I left the 3 CDs I have containing 99% of all the photos taken of our son on top of are car and drove off, leaving the CDs to scatter to the winds.
I’m researching photo-recovery software (my camera uses a SmartCard) and have come across Photo Rescue Wizard 2.0, which is great but it requires OS X. I have OS X on my 2001 iMac but I never use it and would prefer a program that jibes with OS 9.1, with which I’m more comfortable.
I would welcome (read: beg for) any advice. Thanks in advance.
Well, Q.E.D., that seems to be Windows only, and Torgo seems to have a Mac.
Torgo, I have a paid-for copy of Photo Rescue (non-Wizard version). I think the Wizard and the free preview-non-Wizard it lets you create a disk image of your memory card. Send me a copy in email and I can rescue them for you. But, three CD’s??? How big is your memory card? Three CD’s is about 1950MB, and your memory card probably no more than 256MB.
When my card fills up, I transfer the photos to CD and then promptly erase the card so I can fill it up again with more pictures. I’ve gone through this process 3 times. I guess my new question is if I try to recover erased files from this card will it only recover the photos from the last time, or will it be able to recover earlier photos?
Should only be able to recover the photos from the last usage, plus whatever photos were still there. For example (really, really, roughly speaking): say you had 128 photos the penultimate time, and 90 photos this time. You should be able to recover the 90 photos, and maybe 38 or so photos from the previous time.
Yikes. I’m hosed. What if I told you I had transferred the photos from the memory card to my iMac’s hard drive before burning them to CD? Is there a better chance of recovering them from my Mac?
BTW, thanks for the offer Balthisar, I’ll get in contact with you about that.
Torgo Don’t feel alone. My husband did the same thing with our cruise pictures. I’ll send him this thread and he can figure out what software he needs. We thought they were gone forever!
Thanks for asking for us
Have you trashed the picture files after you burned the CDs? If not, then they may just be sitting on your hard drive in some obscure folder. Have you done a general search for files with “.jpg” in their name? If you have trashed them, then the chances of your being able to recover the photos from your hard drive are improved if you haven’t done a lot of disc-intensive work. If there is hope, then use Norton Utilities for system 9.X.
Photo rescue is great and saved my tush too. Another good reason to join the modern world and use OS X.
If they’re in your Trash / Recycle Bin, you have a fair to good chance of recovery, assuming they’re not in some obscure file format or naming convention. I’d expect them to be in some serial-numbered scheme (as example, mine would be something like DSC1783.jpg)
If they’re not on the hard drive (And they probably wouldn’t be unless you explicitly put them there - copying from camera to CD wouldn’t necessarily do it) then you’re more than likely hosed.
A couple months ago, I tried to undelete some images from my camera. It had not been used between deleting and “Oh no!” so the files should have been there. No joy. I aimed Norton Utilities at the thing and it found the file names in a Memory Stick’s version of a FAT, but gave a prognosis of “unlikely” for recovery. Sure enough, I was able to recover exactly none of them. Apparently, cameras will actually damage the files as they’re deleted rather than just changing the first character of the name to (IIRC) lower-case gamma.
