Friday, August 15, 2008

Dangit!

I've finally done it. I am always really careful about my picture files; I am still a bit hesitant about them since there is no physical negative to store. But i also hate having 10 bajillion pictures on my memory card or my computer. So once something is on my computer I clear off my memory card. And once an image is on a blog or sent to Shutterfly i clear it from my computer. The system had worked for nearly 2 years. Until last night. I just realized that i thought the pictures from Rob's last day were on my computer so i cleared them from the memory card and they aren't on my computer. DANG! I really wanted those pictures; they were good pictures. They were the last pictures i had of Rob and the team. Dang, dang, dang. Stupid digital-no-negatives-too-easy-to-throw-away-images camera, stupid flawed system, stupid faulty memory. Is there any way to find images "erased" from memory cards, like things aren't really totally "gone" from your hard drive? Anyone?

4 comments:

Rea said...

You can send it to a "recovery system" person. I have a card I need to do that to. All my pictures from when I was out of it last summer are on a card with a "death error" of some sort so I can't get to them. Look on the 'net for someone near you that does "system recovery"

Melanie said...

Yes, don't do anything else with the card, and find someone who does computer recovery. I have no idea if it works with photo memory cards, but our local tech geek (a guy we found on craigslist, believe it or not) saved pretty much all of our data from a hard drive after a computer completely died on us a couple years ago.

Also, don't rely just on the blog or Shutterfly versions of your pictures; if you don't want them on your computer, burn them to CD or DVD first. Shutterfly is great, but it's not that easy to get the full-resolution versions of your pics back from them if you need to (you'd have to buy a DVD from them, I think).

Melanie said...

I just Googled "recovering images from camera card" and it looks like there's software out there that might help. Here's one link for free software: http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/60

(I've never used this, but Lifehacker linked to it, so it's probably not a virus or scam.)

But if you're going to try this, do it BEFORE you take any more pics -- new pics can overwrite the old ones and make them lost forever.

Niki said...

Thanks for the help, guys.
Unfortunately it may be too late; I've taken several days worth of pictures already. I'll try the software and contact a recovery person, any way. Maybe I'll get lucky.