What if you lost your digital images?

[Haz]

Hello to everyone,

I actually haven't lost my photos per say but instead all of the files are there, in the thumb nail size when you mouse over them the photo turns into a stream of colors across the whole image. In any software application they do the same thing. My Pc is virus free, it gets scanned every other day. Im not quite sure what is going on here. My hard drive is working correctly as well it is only my photos that are affected.

Any ideas or help would be greatly welcome.

Thanks

Haz

[freygr]

You either have a malware program which has messed up a DLL or you installed a program which overwrote a DLL. The other question is do you have the latest AV defs. installed as even one week and the anti-virus can be out of date.

To make maters worst there are fake anti-virus programs out there which do not give any real protection and some are malware them selves.

So if you did not install any programs, a user may have picked up a drive by virus/trojan/worm and many are not detected even by MacAfee, and my work computers with in the last three months have become infected by these drive by programs, and the only choice was to wipe the disk and reinstall the OS!

If you can't find the reason then you will have to backup only your DATA and wipe and reinstall after wiping ALL the hard drives.

[thedogspants]

A couple of weeks ago, My portable HD crashed. All of my pictures were on it. All 5 gigs of them. (they were compressed). I have tried several recovery programs, but none have worked very good. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[freygr]

A couple of weeks ago, My portable HD crashed. All of my pictures were on it. All 5 gigs of them. (they were compressed). I have tried several recovery programs, but none have worked very good. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

You have to recover the directory that the photos were compressed in. Compressed hard drives you have to be very careful as damage to the data on the disk can cause complete loss.

[adriano3]

hi guys,

i have a bit of an issue at hand. i have a an olympus fe-190 digital camera with a 512mb h xd card, and the other day whilst taking pictures it has come up on the screen with 2 options "power off" or "format". as far as i am aware of, if i format the card i will lose all pictures that i have taken on it, which is why i do not want to format as it has pictures of my trip to europe on it. i have tried some of the software on this thread but have had no success with any yet. i cant view the picture on the camera or computer either its like they have already gone. is my best option to contact olympus and ask them for advice of will i never be able to recover these photos? i am going to buy a new xd card for the camera but i really dont want to loose these photos. any help would be grateful.

Cheers Adrian

[freygr]

hi guys,

i have a bit of an issue at hand. i have a an olympus fe-190 digital camera with a 512mb h xd card, and the other day whilst taking pictures it has come up on the screen with 2 options "power off" or "format". as far as i am aware of, if i format the card i will lose all pictures that i have taken on it, which is why i do not want to format as it has pictures of my trip to europe on it. i have tried some of the software on this thread but have had no success with any yet. i cant view the picture on the camera or computer either its like they have already gone. is my best option to contact olympus and ask them for advice of will i never be able to recover these photos? i am going to buy a new xd card for the camera but i really dont want to loose these photos. any help would be grateful.

Cheers Adrian

You will have to try to recover the files from the card using a card reader as your camera will not see the photo files. I tried to recover photo off two xd cards and my card reader did not see the cards at all.

[byjamesderuvoDHQ]

I'd try spin rite. It's pricey, but it'll run over every bad sector like a pit bull until it gets data back and then will mark bad sectors so they can't be used.

[rutherdbrown]

Hi all,

Hey if i lost my images then i will find out it on my email, because i m uploading my images on my email id, If yet, i don't get it then call to my friend if they had takeout.If negatives is possible then take another copies from it. And finally i choose way to register my complain to policestation..

[byjamesderuvoDHQ]

A colleague of mine once told me that if you only have one copy of the backup, you don't really have a backup. And unless you have an off site backup, you're backups aren't really all that safe. For instance, one guy I know uses Carbonite. Another I know, mails DVD Data discs to his mom weekly. It doesn't help to have an external hard drive backup if the house burns down and takes both with it.

As for recovery, Zero Assumption Recovery is a pretty robust program. Also, if your hard drive goes south, SpinRite may be able to recover it and your images. But I'd have an off site option just in case.

[herg]

[QUOTE=byjamesderuvoDHQ]A colleague of mine once told me that if you only have one copy of the backup, you don't really have a backup. And unless you have an off site backup, you're backups aren't really all that safe. For instance, one guy I know uses Carbonite. Another I know, mails DVD Data discs to his mom weekly. It doesn't help to have an external hard drive backup if the house burns down and takes both with it.
QUOTE]

i agree with the "having backups in different locations" just to be safe i have my pictures on an external harddrive at my house as well as on DVD. i have a stack of DVDs at my parents house as well, along with another external harddrive. i give them new discs to add to the collecton there every week or so. and every couple weeks i bring my external there to copy onto the other external (they only live 15 minutes away, or i wouldn't be there as often).

i don't trust DVDs anymore either. i've had a couple discs end up with unreadable images even though they were stored in near perfect conditions. i still use them as backups (kind of as a last resort), but external harddrives are the main backups.

and external harddrives are so cheap these days that you can't afford not to have one at your own place and one at a friend or relative's place

[Ray Dockrey]

I have an internal drive that I copy my RAW files to. I do all the post processing from that drive and then when I do the jpeg conversion those get moved to an external drive.

[herg]

nevermind. double post...

[blondievp]

I have lost many pictures in the past due to memory cards and hard drives failing.

Once I get in I from shooting I upload the pictures to my computer as soon as I get in, I then upload them to facebook so that my friends can see them and the important upload to smugmug.

Smugmug is a website/storage place all in one. I uplaod all my pictures in there original size and format to my account with smug mug. I can then choose to hide the pictures completly so that no one can see the, password the album so only seclected people can see them, hide pictures that I don't want people to see and show off the rest on my smugmug website. There is a chance to sell you pictures, for people to leave feedback.

There are 3 account types that you can have the cheapest starting at $19.00 per year.

This is a well worth investments, saves your precious photos and gives you piece of mind that if your computer fails that there is still a copy of the picture there.

It has unlimited storage space and it quite happily holds my 52GB's worth of 24000 pictures.

blondievp

[Ekir]

--Horror story--

Friend asks me to shoot wedding, I agree as a a present.
@ weeks before wedding, friend books an old classmate for photos, I'm dropped out of it!!
I bring my 3 small toddlers to wedding as I'm not the photog, and spend most of the day running after them
I take a few impromtu shots of her children playing, guests milling flowers etc.
I notice photog leaving halfway thru reception I have had a few too many :O
Get home, upload my few photos to computer, computer turns them into thumbnails instead of saving them to my external HD and burning to a disk as is the defult
I ASS U ME that is has done its jobs, format memory card.
Friend rings up two days later, photog did a horrible job, only 200 photosmost crap, hardly and of kids and reception
I have none to give her!!

Lesson lernt ...Manually transfer files to EHD, burn disk as soon as RAWS are processed, burn printable JPEGS to another disk to take to shops.
Guard my computer with a letter opener in hand!

Lou

[SmartWombat]

And invest in revocery software so you can get all those files back off the memory card(s).
Even after formatting the card, you can recover many, if not all, of the image files.
Did that for someone at work who formatted her card after a holiday, then her boyfriend was killed in a plane crash. Images recovered even after formatting it 2 or 3 x included one of her boyfriend.

[freygr]

--Horror story--

Friend asks me to shoot wedding, I agree as a a present.
@ weeks before wedding, friend books an old classmate for photos, I'm dropped out of it!!
I bring my 3 small toddlers to wedding as I'm not the photog, and spend most of the day running after them
I take a few impromtu shots of her children playing, guests milling flowers etc.
I notice photog leaving halfway thru reception I have had a few too many :O
Get home, upload my few photos to computer, computer turns them into thumbnails instead of saving them to my external HD and burning to a disk as is the defult
I ASS U ME that is has done its jobs, format memory card.
Friend rings up two days later, photog did a horrible job, only 200 photosmost crap, hardly and of kids and reception
I have none to give her!!

Lesson lernt ...Manually transfer files to EHD, burn disk as soon as RAWS are processed, burn printable JPEGS to another disk to take to shops.
Guard my computer with a letter opener in hand!

Lou

Do NOT use the card!!! You can recover all the photos as long as they have not been over written. There are free memory card recovery tools. Read this thread as you will find the programs names. Make sure you only download the files from reputable sites.

[mrbobdou]

Best thing to have is an external backup drive that is stored somewhere else. The online services take weeks to get your data back, and anything you have on-site could be stolen/damaged.

[freygr]

Best thing to have is an external backup drive that is stored somewhere else. The online services take weeks to get your data back, and anything you have on-site could be stolen/damaged.

weeks is better than never!

Online services are a off site backup. If you have a FIRE your local backup would also be gone

[SmartWombat]

Which is why I want electricity to the garage, and extend my 1G network to there so I can have a online backup NAS in there with 6G of storage.
If I can get PV panels on the roof, then I may even be able to run it for free too.

[stanley79finn]

Actually i'm still in the phase of recovery (personally and not my computer) because I recently lost a bunch of photos on the day I was suppose to upload it. The bad thing was that those were photos taken in Bangkok, and I'm not sure ill be back again.

[KKB]

I keep a few back ups in different places. One is on my hard drive of my stand alone computer. This is then copied and taken to another location (my office) monthly. An additional back up other is kept in a small portable hard drive with my laptop.
(I'm just a little paranoid)!

[Photo-John]

I keep a few back ups in different places. One is on my hard drive of my stand alone computer. This is then copied and taken to another location (my office) monthly. An additional back up other is kept in a small portable hard drive with my laptop.
(I'm just a little paranoid)!

You're not paranoid. You're just careful. You're doing it absolutely right

[Mshahid]

First of all you're never "forced" to bet anything, you can always fold. But if you bet all of your money before the end of the hand (the showdown), that's called being "all-in".

[GBaxter]

I had this same problem myself.

[ttmstuff]

I'm not. haha...