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recovering pix you stupidly deleted from your SD card

Listening to:	an annoying tune froma commercial that stubbornly stays in my head, I'll spare you the identifying info
Reading:	powerline websites
Weather:	64, windy, clear

You probably already know this, but in case you don't, when you "delete" stuff from hard drives and solid-state media like SD and CompactFlash cards and whatnot, it's not really deleting the stuff. Typically just the index that the device (your computer, your camera, your PDA) uses to locate the files on the media gets wiped. So if you get rid of an old computer, you really need to either magnetically erase your hard drive, or actually rewrite it with less meaningful 1's and 0's if you don't want somebody to be able to recover your files. Cuz it's seriously easy to recover files you think you deleted, especially those you most recently think you deleted.

Case in point, I thought I dragged and dropped a bunch of photos from a couple of SD cards onto my harddrive yesterday morning. I was in a hurry (of course, inviting Murphy to monkey with my world), since there was a tremendous photo opp of my sweeeeeeet little quasigrandbaby Alan (more on this coming up) happening and my camera said my card was full. So I pulled the 1M SD card out of my camera, and grabbed a couple smaller cards I had lying around (64M and 32M) and one at a time popped them into my card drive and viewed their contents.

Of course the big one had several folders of shots which the camera organizes automatically, bla bla, so I thought I'd just shortcut it (another bell to summon the evil Murphy into my computer room) and select all the folders and copy and paste them into a folder in my photos folder. Roight. After the quick select all, copy, paste I clicked back to the card, all still selected, and hit delete to clear the card for more use. Groovy.

Not. Later I went back and saw though it was successful on the cards with only one subfolder, the one with multiple subs did not copy properly. I just got the folder names each with one mystery filetype within, no shots. Dangit! It almost kept me awake last night after I realized it, irked me out, what had I lost?

So after the big community fight the power lines meeting this afternoon (of course, more on this later, too), I decided to try to find some recovery. Hot freakin damn I got lucky. I found a freeb that totally did the trick simply and beautifully. http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm It took me a sec to figure out how to get the files saved once it detected them, but that was a tiny bump in otherwise sweet smooth sailing getting my files back. Now perhaps I wrote over a few sectors with new pix, and therefore missed recovering a few shots, but I honestly don't remember any that aren't here, and I got a big boatload back, so I'm a happy happy camper.

permalink posted by cat 6:23 PM

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