First of all, thank you to everyone for your sweet thoughts and offers for help. As for me, I'm okay. No, I didn't recover all of my photos, but I will be fine. I did try out a recovery software that you can download for free and then run the recovery process and view what you could recover. Then, if you want to go ahead and actually recover those files, you pay for the software. Well, I downloaded it, ran it (which took an insanely long time... one full day!) and then I sat and attempted to sift through the gazillion files it brought up for me. I set the program to only recover JPEG files on my hard drive, and I'll tell ya what... apparently the computer takes an image of EVERYTHING you look at while on the computer. Every time you open a window, it takes a pictures, open a file, it takes a picture, open a blog, it takes a picture. I had pictures of pictures of pictures! Pictures of icons on my computer! Pictures of different computer symbols! Total random weird things! It was crazy! There were over 55,000 files that I was going to have to sort through in about 30 different file folders! And yes, some of them were my pictures, but the file size was usually like 1K to 32K. And yes there were some that were the right size, and ideally they would all be in the same search folder and I could just select them all, pay for the software, restore the pictures to my computer and all would be well. But no. There were multiple copies of the multiple picture in multiple folders, all with different sizes, so that I never knew where each picture was coming from and which was the file I actually needed. I was going absolutely bonkers. (Just trust me... it was insane.) And then, I remembered that I still had some pictures on my SD card from the camera that I hadn't deleted, so there were a few extra pictures I could keep, and today in the trash on my computer, I found a few more picture files as well (including some of Summer's baby ones that I would have been sad to lose). All in all, I recovered about 200 more pictures from those locations (not including the ones I still had on my computer in random places). So the bottom line is, I'm not going to pay $40 for a 5-day headache... I'm going to learn from my mistake, backup my files, salvage what I can, and call it a day. As far as I can tell, I have my most important and favorite pictures, so I'm okay. (That is, I will be once I get the truly most important ones back from my mom!) :) Thanks again for all your caring. Loves to all.
4 comments:
Okay, so is your next post about "How to back-up your files"????!!!! I would love to hear the best way to undergo this process :-)
As minimal as it is... sigh of relief. What I just do is I take my memory card to wherever and get a cd made of all the pictures on it and then I just print out my absolute favs. Between that and my blog I figure I should have it all pretty well covered (knock on wood!) I know with the kids it's crazy to get pictures developed- when I finally get there I'm usually putting around 800 pics on 5 different cd's, but their priceless right? :) Love you!!! (This is Kristi:)
Debbie,
I did the same thing with my memory card the other day. I found a recovery program for FREE and it worked! (I was not about to pay $40 for my pictures, although I was tempted because Harrison's baptism picts were there.) The program is called PC Inspector smart recovery. It is made by Convar (try convar.com). It will do your hard drive as well. I would at least try your memory card. There are probably deleted files that have not been reformatted yet. It is worth a try since it is FREE!!! And VERY easy to use!
Deb,
The same things happened to me last month after I had scanned and editted about 500 photos for the dvds we are having made about Grandma and Grandpa. I was totally sick and depresses. But I read somewhere on the internet that if you take out your hard drive and put it in the freezer over night, then in the morning put your harddrive into a working computer, you should be able to retrieve all your data. We did that and I got everything back!!! I quickly downloaded all the pics and files onto flashdrives and put the data onto other computers. Funny thing, we put the hard drive back into the computer that crashed and it works just like before--crazy. But the hard drive had completely crashed and I took it to the Geek Squad and they said they couldn't get any data. But the freezer did the trick. Good luck!
Aunt Rebecca
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