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Utterly, utterly stupid...
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.
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.
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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.
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
Cuong
http://www.jonathanswinton.com
http://www.swintoncounseling.com
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.
Brian
http://photos.katzclix.com
blog - http://blog.katzclix.com
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
* 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.
Bugs
Spiders
Flowers
Guess I'll have to go back and do a re-shoot.
Enjoy redoing the pics
Bugs
Spiders
Flowers
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.
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!
-Fleetwood Mac
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.
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