Oops. I didn’t mean to do that

Deary, deary me. We got home from our trip to the wilds of Far North Queensland, and I couldn’t wait to turn on the computer to take a look at my photos on the big screen. I loaded the pics into Lightroom, then cleared the SD card (as you do). AFTER that I noticed a whole days worth of pictures were missing – the day when I really thought I’d made some great shots.

I didn’t say Oops! Those of you who know me would be aware that a succession of adjectives starting with F was in the mix. Sorry, Mum, but sometimes nothing else will do. We’d stumbled off a train at 5am after a pretty ordinary nights’ sleep. You know how it is – you check the time every hour on the hour so as not to miss the stop. Lesson #1: don’t do anything remotely technical while in zombie mode.

After I’d recovered from the resulting heart spasm, I got my overtired brain into gear.Operating systems don’t actually delete anything. The pictures should still be there. If you’re thinking I could have looked in the recycle bin, the OS only does that with files on the hard drive, not temporary devices like SD cards. But even so, I suspected my files should still be there.

You’ll be familiar with the Explorer interface when you open a folder on your computer. You get a list of files, date, file type, size. Click on a filename, and you get the file. The interface is like an index card. Each entry contains information that the OS uses to find the data and display it. When you delete a file, the record on the index card is flagged as ‘deleted’. That’s it – unless you use special software to erase the actual data. Over time, your ‘deleted’ data will be overwritten as you save new data. But until that time, your existing data is still there, unchanged.

Back in the day, I could have wriggled my way into the OS and toggled that delete flag on the index record – but that was then, and this is now, so I went looking for an application to recover my pictures.

There are plenty of packages out there to do the job, but I’m very careful about software without a recommendation. I paid good money for one, years ago, that looked great – but didn’t work at all. I think they were collecting credit card details – so I cancelled my credit card, with the associated dramas. This time, I found what I was looking for via CNet, complete with a ‘how to’ article. And the best news is, the app is FREE. There is an option to buy a more sophisticated version, but I didn’t need it.

I installed Recuva and ran the app on my SD cards. It worked as described, but while the software found a lot of old data which hadn’t been overwritten, it didn’t find my files from the last month. After a fair bit of mucking about, and a good night’s sleep, I thought the issue was the program was looking for the usual image file types – .jpg, .tiff, .png, .bmp – but not Canon’s raw file format, .CR2. So I went into Recuva’s advanced mode and changed the search parameters to just *.CR2. And… bingo! I have my pictures back!

So if you ever have an ‘oh shit’ moment, deleting a file you didn’t mean to delete, try Recuva. In our case, it’s a bloody sight cheaper than a trip back to Karumba and environs.

And here’s a picture from that day, just as a bonus prize before I write the blog posts for the trip.