Utterly, utterly stupid...

BigAl

Yesterday I went out to a local nature reserve to see what was on offer. I found a birdie (not very attractive) called a Stone Chat (female) right next to the road. Now, these birds usually take flight if you just look at them, but this one just hopped about in the bush quite happily ignoring us snapping away.



As you can see, not very exciting to look at, but very exciting for me. While snapping away, my 40d hit 999 shots so wanted a new card - I was expecting this, so whipped out a new card and swapped the cards. I was a bit puzzled when I found the new card was not empty (I usually delete on the computer), but thought, must be from the last session in the reserve and formatted the card and carried on snapping (another 8 shots). Shortly after that the birdie flew off (fortunately it turns out). I then put the full card into the PD70x to download the pics. I was just about to drive off when I noticed that the PD70x was finished WITH ZERO FILES COPIED. In my excitement, I had put the SAME card back into the camera :cry

I whipped that card out, put it in my pocket, and put the correct card in the camera. When I got home, the first thing I did was to start up PC Inspector File Recovery which I've had success with in the past. This found 72 files, but wierd stuff like tiffs, arj, pdfs and even exes - stuff that shouldn't be on my card. I was now really depressed as there was some good stuff on that card. :cry

While on the Convar site to download a newer version of PCI File Recovery, I came across something new: Smart Recovery. This software is made for idiotic mistakes like I had done. It looks for specific files, like CR2 (even though it's not mentioned on their Website), which I was looking for. It took a long time, but a got all my pics back, except the eight that had been overwritten - lost some chopper shots there, but that's not the worst!

Can one really be so stupid? Thankfully, I managed to recover most of my shots :barb

Windows users should look to keeping this software on their PCs - best it's free.

ziggy53

Don't be too hard on yourself, it's an easy (too easy) mistake to make. Been there, done that.

When I did it I was shooting for my employer and software recovery also saved me. I think I had to redo 1 shot and avoided serious embarrassment.

When I do a wedding now I use a card storage device I designed myself that allows me to store the spent cards upside down and makes visual identification of used storage much easier.

Cuong

I numbered my cards to help avoid confusion. When in doubt, I'd play back to see what's on the card to make sure. Good save with the recovery software.

Cuong

swintonphoto

I didn't even realize such software existed. Thanks for the info!

bkatz

Great timing - there was an article on this today on zdnet.

I use a storage device like Ziggy where I can put the cards in upside down and I always format all cards before I go out - that way if there is something on a card I do not use it.

claudermilk

Ouch. That's why I am very meticulous when swapping cards; either have a pre-selected place on a nearby surface for used & clear cards, or hold the just-finished card in my mouth while inserting the clear card in the camera. If I find a card is unexpectedly non-empty, I either review a few of the images (time allowing) or swap again to a clear card.

BigAl

Interesting phenomenon I found with the recovered files. Of the 62 files recovered, 12 were damaged (block of rubbish in bottom right corner) and one was totally US (severe blue cast plus the block of rubbish in bottom right corner). DPP and Adobe's DNG converter refused to read these files at all. All other software tried, read the embedded jpeg with no problem, and the embedded jpegs showed no errors. Here's a breakdown of software which I found which can actually read the RAW part of 40d RAW files:

* RAW Therapee read the damaged RAW files with v2.3 beta, but the images were unacceptably dark. I had this same problem with v2.2 and 350d RAW, but tweaking of the default settings files sorted that out. The same did not work with v2.3 beta. (Of course, a huge disadvantage of RAW Therapee is that it only copies EXIF data to jpegs and not tiffs).
* FastStone Image Viewer reads the embedded jpeg, but as soon as you force it to read the RAW (A from the keyboard) it reads the file but the image gets a magenta cast (caused by an older version of dcraw).
* Irfanview reads the embedded jpegs, but try what I may, there was no way I could get it to read the full RAW file. I spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to find out why, but then I realised it used Zoombrowser's helper files and Zoombrowser only reads the embedded jpegs.

So here I was very frustrated, so I went looking for other apps that used dcraw, and found that XnView used the latest one. I have XnView, but don't like the interface, preferring FastStone. I downloaded the latest version and it could read the 40d's RAW, including the damaged files, with no problem. However, as with RAW Therapee, with saved files, only jpegs retain EXIF data (I assume something to do with dcraw).

Here is one of the broken files:



The size of the damaged block is usually the same width, but varies in height in some of the pics - which is rather strange to me as I thought the pixels would be written consecutively. Another interesting thing was that the broken files were consecutive, and of the same subject - I have no idea why that should be either

Anyway, what it boils down to, is that there is not too much available for reading RAW files from the newer cameras.

Another bit of useless information: the embedded jpeg in a 40d RAW file is pretty large: 1936x1288 pixels (I thought it was only thumbnail size), whereas the original image size is 3888x2592 pixels.

timk519

Somewhere, out there, are 500 shots I took of the northern part of the Cascade loop, that didn't make it to my archives, and I can't use this recovery software to get them back. :cry

Guess I'll have to go back and do a re-shoot.

BigAl

timk519 wrote:

Somewhere, out there, are 500 shots I took of the northern part of the Cascade loop, that didn't make it to my archives, and I can't use this recovery software to get them back. :cry

Guess I'll have to go back and do a re-shoot.

Remember, you can only recover the files if you haven't reused the memory cards. Once you format and start writing to a card it gets progressively more difficult to recover lost pics on that card - once it has been filled again, the old images are gone forever.

Enjoy redoing the pics

timk519

BigAl wrote:

Remember, you can only recover the files if you haven't reused the memory cards. Once you format and start writing to a card it gets progressively more difficult to recover lost pics on that card - once it has been filled again, the old images are gone forever.

Enjoy redoing the pics

In my case I was on a 6 week trip, and didn't discover those pics were missing until after I got home. And since I filled the card every day...ah well. Lesson learned!

Art Scott

BigAl wrote:

Remember, you can only recover the files if you haven't reused the memory cards. Once you format and start writing to a card it gets progressively more difficult to recover lost pics on that card - once it has been filled again, the old images are gone forever.

Enjoy redoing the pics

I have found Image Rescue 2 to be excellent and it came packed on my Lexar 2gb pro cards, so it was free (or included in the price) but both of my Lexars were retailing for $180 when I grabbed 'em on sale for less than $100.....but it can be had separately for around $40 I think......I have used this software to recover off the Lexar and also my Transcend cards....my only gripe is that it renumbers the files butr that is so minor that I cannot really count it as a gripe ....so I guess I really have none.

Yes I did burn 2 cd copies of the software for future use.

jdryan3

Art Scott wrote:

I have found Image Rescue 2 to be excellent and it came packed on my Lexar 2gb pro cards, so it was free (or included in the price) but both of my Lexars were retailing for $180 when I grabbed 'em on sale for less than $100.....but it can be had separately for around $40

I got a copy of RescuePRO with my new SanDisk Extreme USB 2.0 CF/SD Reader a couple of weeks ago. Only $27 .... and you get a free reader with it!

jww

bkatz wrote:

I use a storage device like Ziggy where I can put the cards in upside down and I always format all cards before I go out - that way if there is something on a card I do not use it.

Yup.. I have been doing that also.. It helps keeps me sane! (well... somewhat sane) ...although one extra step I now do is that the newly removed card goes in my Epson 3000 for a backup before I put the new card in.

[Deleted User]

While I can't admit to doing it with a memory card I have done worse, I formatted the Financial directors laptop hard disk :

It was arranged and I had copied some stuff off he wanted but he forgot to tell me about a particular folder he wanted, talk about wanting a big hole to open up and swallow me. Fortunately a IT consultant I had working with us bailed me out and installed a recovery program that recovered 95% of the data wanted.

It was not so much of a case I never though about a recovery program I was so shocked at what had happened and the argument we had that my mind just stopped functioning. I bought the consultant a few beers that night

Tim

timk519

draggin wrote:

It was arranged and I had copied some stuff off he wanted but he forgot to tell me about a particular folder he wanted, talk about wanting a big hole to open up and swallow me. Fortunately a IT consultant I had working with us bailed me out and installed a recovery program that recovered 95% of the data wanted.

It was not so much of a case I never though about a recovery program I was so shocked at what had happened and the argument we had that my mind just stopped functioning.

Let this be a lesson to you, never format a drive w/out asking the customer / client to confirm everything they want off the system is actually off it!