I was getting ready to photograph a recently completed painting the other day, so I grabbed my SD card out of my card reader, tossed it into my camera and got ready to shoot. When I turned on my camera, I noticed the card was full, so I deleted all the images to make more space.
Sounds normal enough.
Except I forgot that I never actually uploaded the previous contents of the card, which contained all my reference for the next painting I had to do! Thats hundreds of photos, hours of work, and a paid photo shoot completely trashed!
Normally, this would be occasion for a TOTAL freak out! Luckily (or stupidly, depending on your outlook), I’ve had this happen to me before, so I knew what to do.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with how hard drives and memory cards work, deleted files are never actually deleted. They are simply written over. When you supposedly delete a file, you are telling your computer (or camera) to allocate that previous space as available. The file doesn’t actually go away until you write something on top of it (and sometimes not even then).
I discovered my error seconds after hitting the ‘Delete All’ button, so I did not save any new images to the card. The old files were still there, I just couldn’t see them.
Fortunately, there are a ton of programs out there that help you retrieve those lost files. Some of those programs are free, some are not, some are fake and malicious, and some don’t recover every type of file.
My favorite program, which has saved my butt TWICE now, is Photorec.
Photorec is free, trustworthy, works on a Mac, and can retrieve RAW files, which many of the other programs can not do. In about 10 minutes, Photorec recovered ALL of my photos from the previous shoot, both RAW and JPG, and saved me a ton of aggravation.
The other nice thing about Photorec is that it doesn’t actually require an application install. It’s simply a script that runs in Unix, so you don’t need to worry about viruses or uninstalls when you’re done.
You can download Photorec (as part of a bundle) here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Wow, good to know. Thanks Dan!
wow, good info. I knew how the “deleting” actually occurred but I had suspected that the retrieval process would be more difficult. Thanks for the referral to that software!
Thanks for the heads up, Dan! This happened to me a couple years ago, but the software I used at the time (can't remember the name) only managed to recover about two thirds of the photos, and some of them were cropped or damaged. Nice to know that there's a program that actually works.
What an emotional roller coaster this post put me on (I cried, I cheered). Good to know there's a solution! I had no idea. Also, we can't mention Unix without quoting Lex from Jurassic Park: It's a Unix system… I know this…
Saved my ass a couple times
Thanks, I have done the same. Now I know where to go.
That's great to know! I would have cried.
Thanks for this! I haven't had any incidents like that in recent memory but it's really handy to know a program like that exists. Definitely bookmarking this just in case.
Thanks for the information! Never done this before, but it's not unlikely to happen! Also, I'm an illustration student. It's so good to know that even the professionals make these kinds of mistakes! The only reason I'd say that is because you recovered your photos!