Nothing wrenches the heart like accidentally erasing a memory card full of images.But all is not necessarily lost.
A few years ago, a buddy of mine's mother was approaching her 100th birthday. She didn't get out much anymore, but she'd been to the hairdresser and had her hair Cool Whipped to perfection. She even went to the dry cleaner to get her Queen Bee formal gown pressed.
The tiara she always kept gleaming. She enlisted her friend to pick her up at her summer residence to drive her to her son's newly remodeled home. His dinky two-bedroom gardener's shack had been magically rebuilt into a four-bedroom palace with closets the size of shoe stores. And her son even got a haircut. She'd been begging him to do that for 32 years. "Danny, why don't you get a haircut? Take the money from my purse. Go on."
I'd recently been out to shoot the new baseball stadium in town, so I brought along the shots on the Compact Flash I'd used. While we were waiting for the Queen Mum, I plugged my digicam into their television and wowed the kids with delusions of a World Series to come.
Naturally, I also brought a blank card to shoot the festivities. And, as luck would have it, I got a once-in-a-lifetime shot of mother and son? yep, a rare simultaneous smiling. The next morning, before any cup of anything could clear the cobwebs from my head, I deleted the wrong card. "No," I said. "I didn't." Oh, yeah, I did. But I was confident I could recover the data from the card. I'd done it with floppies, why not with a card? So, I spent the next few weeks trying every trick in the book to undelete the files on the card. But they were lost.
I consoled myself with the thought that I'd get that portrait again one day, but the dear matriarch never lived to see her 101st birthday. And her son was so distraught; he let his hair grow out again.
It's a sad story. But there's no reason it should ever happen again. These days, even one of the kids could salvage that image while waiting for a World Series. All the little gotchas that defeated me years ago have themselves been defeated by modern utilities designed especially for just this sort of thing.
How They Don't Work
The first thing to know is that? Whether you are using a Macintosh or a Windows PC? Your storage device is formatted for MS-DOS. Macintoshes have no trouble reading and writing MS-DOS media (and PCs can handle Macintosh media with third-party software). But neither of them is any good at running disk utilities on the other's media. Norton knows your native file system, period. So, recovery of a DOS-formatted card is a generally a Windows task.
Unfortunately, Windows might see your card only as a network drive (where, as with floppies, deletions are not safely buffered in the Recycle Bin). And it's rude to reorganize the directories of network drives, so your usually reliable un-erase utility might not go there.
The size of your card is also a factor. The file allocation table for a 16 MB card is not quite the same beast as for a 256 MB card, which is also why some larger-capacity cards don't work in some cameras.
The complications build from there. You might have success using freeware to un-erase your card.
Source: O’Reilley | Portfolio Website | Online Portfolio
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