What if you lost your digital images?

[freygr]

I have not had a CF card fail yet, but it is only a matter of time.

clip....

I also back up to DVD just in case and put those DVD's in a fire safe (our house burned when I was in 5th grade)

Can't be too careful!

thanks,
Wes

Really you shouldn't have those DVD's in your house they should be at your work if passable or a another family members or fiends house, or a set at all three places.

Gordon

[mikeb380]

When I had my business I backed up every night and next day I took the backup to the bank and put it in my lockbox there. I also kept a copy of the backup in the ofice and rotated the backup tapes ( had a 9 track drive). That way the most I could lose would be one day's work. Really came in handy a time or 3. It pays to back up and keep a copy elsewhere, off premises.

Now, when I download cards, I copy to HD and make a copy to another drive. I have two internal drives and a 320 g external drive. Nothing goes on boot drive except OS and dlls, etc. My main drive is partitioned so that I have software on a different "drive" than other stuff. I use the second drive which has nothing on it besides photo files. I never work with original files, I copy files I want to work on to another directory and work on those. That way I always have 2 original copies. When I convert RAW files, I always convert to tiff files as jpg is lossy and every time you save them you lose data. If I am going to make different size prints or show on web, I copy each tif and resize it. I often have as many as 5 or 6 copies of each tif file. I might have a 5X7, an 8X10, 11X14, and the original size from the camera. sometimes I will make an album of the photos to present to someone. I also process the tif files; color, contrast, etc; before I convert to jpg if I need a jpg for some reason.

Also, I never use the camera to transfer files from card to puter. Card readers are inexpensive enough and they are faster than camera transfer. It pays to be careful and avoid heart attacks caused by deletion of precious files.
Michael :-)

[another view]

Is many 1 or 2 Gig CF cards better than a few 4gig cards? That way if one fails........

Yes, and that's exactly the reason why. I've never had a card failure other than one brand new out of the box, but it might only be a matter of time for me too... Also helps with the chance for human error - losing a card, formatting it at the wrong time, etc.

[DEvianT]

I have two internal data drives and one OS drive.
OS drive is split C&D C is OS only D is applications.
The two data drives are mirrored so if one fails I loose nothing.
Once per week the whole drive is copied to an external drive of the same size.
Once a year I replace the external drive and archive it along with that years work on archival DVD's
I also Ghost Image the C&D every two days. SO I can restore in about 2 hours with no loss.

[thecoy]

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.

Same thing here man.. the ZZZZtwit ZZZZZ .... but this was because of a virus.

Photos gone, and I guess they will be just memories.

[freygr]

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.

Same thing here man.. the ZZZZtwit ZZZZZ .... but this was because of a virus.

Photos gone, and I guess they will be just memories.

If you did not over write with new photos, on your memory cards you can recover the photos from the memory cards. If the photo files have not been over written on the hard drive you can recover the photos.

Rules for data recovery:

1) do not save anything to the hard drive which has the files on it
2) do not install programs to that hard drive which has the files on it
3) do not defrag the hard drive which has the files on it

Reason you do not wish to overwrite the deleted files making them unrecoverable.

Most important is you will need a different writable drive to save the files to.

[freygr]

opps On my post I forgot to add DO NOT to 2 and three during the posting!!!!!

[another view]

opps On my post I forgot to add DO NOT to 2 and three during the posting!!!!!

I added it to your post above too. Good points!

[freygr]

I added it to your post above too. Good points!

Thank You, Later the next day I notice that error but I did not have an edit button. I must of been not my optimal self that night. :mad2:

[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.

[jamadophotography]

RescuePro is awesome. Not 100% but still better than nothing!!!!

[pipi99]

Thanks for sharing ...

[StanleyBot]

Hi Intimate meeting without obligation Clik info...

[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.

[PicBackMan]

I has happened to me, and believe me the feeling is not good. I used to format my SD card after i have copied them onto my laptop, and unfortunately my system crashed. As I'm not a tech savvy person I took to an expert to see if he could recover my data, My bad luck, all what i had in the system had gone. Since then I made sure to have multiple backups. In the form of DVDs, External hard drives, cloud storage etc. This way So, now if I loose my photos at one place, I can be rest assured that they are safe at another.

[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..

[CMather]

Yes +1 for RescuePro. Just used it to recover 3GB of bad data for a customer. Worked well. As stated below not 100% however we ended up getting about 85% of the corrupted data. Customer was very happy. :-)

[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.