Lost and found
I thought my holiday photos were lost forever, when suddenly it occurred to me that there was a way to get them back. I was reading a local IT newspaper in the office kitchen, waiting for my tea water to boil, when I spotted an ad for Ibas. Ibas is a Norwegian company specializing in data recovery. I mostly associate them with really spectacular recovery operations after fires and shipwrecks, and so on. However, the ad said they also did this for private individuals who had lost their digital photos.
Metro mural, Moscow (partial) |
This set me thinking, because although I had deleted the holiday photos from the memory chip in my camera, I still hadn't filled it up with new pictures. And that should mean that at least some of the old pictures would still be on it. So, I thought, why not give it a try. I looked at the Ibas web site, which made it clear that they had some kind of offering that was suitable, but it was hard to figure out how to make use of it. A phone call helped, and eventually I found four photo stores in Oslo that do this kind of recovery.
Painter with crosses, Sudak, Crimea |
It turned out to be pretty simple. You go there, and give them the memory chip. They run a computer program that scans your chip for a good while, and then copy everything they find onto a CD-ROM. This gave me 582 pictures, of which 313 really were from the Russia/Ukraine trip. A few (5-10) are only half pictures, but the rest are complete. For some strange reason there seems to be noticeably more noise in these recovered pictures than in the originals, but the important thing is that I have them back.
Sad cat, Sudak, Crimea |
I'm happier than I can tell you to get all of these back. I took a lot of photos I was really happy with during this trip, some specifically for blogging purposes, and losing them was a real blow. Now I've gotten almost half of them back. In retrospect I feel silly for not thinking of this before; if I had I would have had all of the photos now. Anyway, I'm going to celebrate this with a beer or two.
Sudak, Crimea |
Sudak, Crimea |
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Comments
Arnoud Haak - 2006-11-21 09:22:53
Nice! Did you know that there are recoveryprogrammes for consumers on the market? Easy Recovery is the most known.
Lars Marius - 2006-11-21 14:17:42
I suspected there must be such recovery programs, and it turns out Easy Recovery is the one they used. (It's made by OnTrack, which has bought Ibas.)
I didn't want to buy the program, because I thought (or hoped :) this would be a one-time only thing, so I thought I'd save money that way.
Lars Marius - 2007-07-11 16:07:57
For the record: I found an open source tool for this today that looks quite powerful: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Elaine Sinai - 2007-08-17 06:14:40
Our family lost our memory card when they put in a new one for the camera, blue, 'Verbatim 12' somewhere in Sydney (July 16 &17 2007), Australia. We wrote to the Sydney Wildlife Centre and the Australian Museum, where we were last, and also to the Medina Grand, where we stayed.The Australian Museum in Sydney found a 'Canon SD Memory Card SDC - 16M,'also blue, but my husband says it's definitely not ours.
There is no chance of recovery, but is it possible that if anyone found it, they would post it on the web? Seems to be hopeless, though, but I'm just trying!