Yesterday, pre-coffee, I put an sd card in a camera and intialised (formatted it). I instantly realised I’d formatted

– wedding photos
– honeymoon photos
– holiday photos from the last two years
– lots of other photos and videos

which were all thankfully already backed up but also

– my little boy’s first birthday photos

which weren’t.

Gutted doesn’t come close to how i felt. My wife was likewise gutted – and set to kill me.

but then i got googling and found a brilliant free bit of software which has recovered the entire card for me.
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm

Everything has now been backed up.

The moral of this story?
1) Always back up important pictures and stuff quickly
2) If something says “this will delete everything. Are you sure?” Make sure you’re sure
3) Don’t tell your wife unless you know there’s no way to fix it.

😳

Yeah stupid video camera, wanted to delete a few files so went into batch delete or some similar name and it nuked the entire card. Recovered it but iirc it came out as one continuous video file. meh.

I think digital cams have probably been a bit of a step backwards, got loads of pics on file but print very very few out. SO they stay on file and don’t get view very often.

Just now I managed to delete all the contents of my dropbox folder (moving the file on my windows PC to the desktop managed to unsynch and delete it all…)
Eeek!

Thankfully, it’s all stored for 30 days so just restored it…but there was a moment of panic!

DrP

I’ve used that tool a couple of times on corrupted SD cards. I didn’t realise it would work after a formatting though. Good to know..

Yep, I coughed up £20 and got them all back via some recovery SW.

We got burgled. The video camera was taken. All the footage of our daughter from the first 3 years of her life… gone.

Lesson learned there. 😥

I upload everything to Flickr as well, so Yahoo worry about multiple site backups for me. 1TB of free storage.

My colleague just got burgled and it reminded me (again) that I need to sort out my backup properly – everything is on laptop and NAS which are helpfully stored in the same building…

I think digital cams have probably been a bit of a step backwards, got loads of pics on file but print very very few out. SO they stay on file and don’t get view very often.

That’s not really a fault of digital cameras. It’s your fault. Print as many (or as few) as you like. Come to our house and you’ll see loads of picture on the walls, (nearly) all taken with digital cameras. We also have all our digital pics on a screen saver on the TV, so regularly have a nice little show of the last x years of our life. We love it, guests are impressed by it and often comment that they need to sort their photos out.

Like I say, there’s loads you can do that is neither difficult nor costly. If you don’t have your digital photos where you and others can see them, do something about it. Did you take film photographs and never get them developed? Leaving your pics on the memory card or just dumping them on the computer is the same thing really.

{EDIT] – well recovered Chris. Lucky escape 🙂

I think digital cams have probably been a bit of a step backwards, got loads of pics on file but print very very few out. SO they stay on file and don’t get view very often.

We cover the kitchen tiles in holiday photos etc. Mainly to remind us to book the next one..

Kitchen by brf, on Flickr

Yes, mrsDT’s formatted the camera whilst were were trekking in Morroco.
Toubkal summit photo’s the lot, gone. She felt dreadful, we kept using the camera with the same card in it for the rest of our trip.
When we got home I used the same software to recover most of the pictures. What I did learn though is it’s best to stop using the card (obvious really) as we did loose some.