Lost In Cyberspace

How many of us have opened up the back of a camera with exposed film in it, forgotten to close the lens after you pulled the slide on you sheet film holder, turned on the lights in the darkroom with exposed film sitting on the counter, or had other similar film mishaps? Digital photography has it own mishaps.

I am a computer systems administrator for a small graphic services company in South Orange County so I should know better than to lose some of my digital work. I recently had a 120 GB hard disk failure. When the disk failed, it was a slow death of all my data, and not all of it was backed up. It started with corrupted files and read-write errors. What was more frustrating was that the cause was not clear as it was a failure of several components on my computer. It was not a fun trying to find the root of the problem on my home digital dark room.

A few months ago, my friend Jan returned from Alaska. She had hired a plane and helicopter to fly around Denali and shoot some aerial views of the mountains with her digital camera. When she got the card home, it was not readable; and she was sure the images were there. She took the card over to Samys Camera in Orange County, and they were able to recover the photos for her. She said they used some utilities to recover her precious photos.

A crew from my office was in Hawaii shooting a sports equipment catalog. They were shooting with the new Nikon D2x and San Disk Ultra II compact flash cards. Their last shots in Hawaii came back with the message "Warning: Card Cannot be Read." They had just lost about 95 shots on a 1 GB card, akin to losing three rolls of film!

They brought me the card to rescue. This was the first card that I have had to recover. I’ve recovered many hard disks that were not physically defective and thought I would try some of my techniques on flash cards. After going through my bag of tricks, I had recovered no images. I then went to look for picture recovery utilities that Samy’s used.

I first went to the SanDisk web site, which linked me to www.lc-tech.com/rescuepro.htm, and I downloaded Rescue Pro Demo, a recovery solution for digital media. I tried the software on the disk image copy of the failed flash card, and it revealed 92 images and thumbnails that I could recover (see screen capture, below). I immediately purchased the software online, installed, it and used the wizard driven interface to make a very easy recovery of the files. Another version and very similar product called Photorecovery has a few more controls. I looked into the differences and learned that Sandisk has simplified the Rescue Pro interface to make it easier for end users.

According to LC Technology it can, on some cameras, retrieve deleted and reformatted images; it will also work on flash memory MP3 players. To recover data, it does not write to the card to risk further damage any recoverable data. This is useful if you want to use other recovery utilities, if this one does not do the trick. LC Technology also offers recovery services, if you choose to send in your media. Note: I tried only the Mac version of the software; I did not try the Windows version.

All the photos were recovered! The downside was that recovered data had some minor quirks. The previews disappeared and were replace with odd menu displays; when I tried to resize the wizard window, it installed into the hard disk root level as opposed to the Applications folder, and did not ask me were to put the recovered files; they were put into the users/recovered directory created during recovery. LC Technology said that this was due to the Mac OS interface when porting to the Mac OS from the Windows version. It does keep the EXIF data but not the original names.

The bottom line is that you should have a lot of backups. I also use an Image Tank and an iPod for backups.

Digital Photography, Lost in Cyberspace!