Yesterday I got into corruption. What I mean is digital things going wrong, and this wrongness causing new wrongness. It all started when I had the camera in hand to take out the memory card for transferring the photographs to the iMac.
I was a bit tired, and thus I wasn't sharp enough, and so instead of doing what I should have done I started up the camera, navigated the menus, and ... formatted the memory card. One second too late I realized what I was doing.
Well, what to do? I searched the net for software for rescuing photographs from memory cards, and there is a lot of that available. I tried a free one from the App Store, but that was only a demo, the full version was over 30 euro... and I'm cheap. So I bought the cheapest non-free app, costing something like 12 euro.
But even though the app installed and started up, it didn't show the memory card in the list of devices. In fact, no disks were shown. After searching for help pages (not much help), I finally found a link for downloading a different version of the same software from the web pages of the company. And finally the memory card was shown, I could do a search, and a lot of files were found, including the photographs from yesterday. And the recovery function seemed to work, fetching several hundred files.
After looking at the files I deleted some (preview images) and imported the rest into Aperture. ... But then Aperture crashed. Whn I started it up again, there was a message telling of problems with the Aperture Library, which had to be repaired. That took some time. When that was finished I (and the iMac) went to sleep (or I tried without real success).
Today I started up Aperture once again. And the Library needed repairs, again. I noticed that some of the imported photographs seemed to have corrupt data, and I deleted those. Finally everything seemed to be back to normal. I hope. I picked the best and deleted the rest, and uploaded to Flickr.
What you see here are some of the rescued photographs from yesterday, plus one taken today. I'm not sure whether the rescue operation was worth the effort, but at least I now know something of what to do if this happens again. I fact, it is surprising that the same thing hasn't happened previously.
(Posting title is from the poem The Rescue by Robert Creeley.)
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6 comments:
Juha, you are not alone with such a mistake: twice already I had to use a data rescue utility (very successful under linux: I did not loose a single frame), and meanwhile I've tried to simplify my procedures even more, especially as downloading is quite often done at the end of the day and a quite low level of concentration.
Sorry to hear that you had so many problems. I have lost so many photos/negatives in my time that I no longer worry when it happens but I know what the feeling is like and it is not pleasant. Glad to know you managed to salvage most of your images. I do like happy endings.
@Markus: Several memory cards have physically fallen apart in use, but never so far have I accidentally formatted the memory card. Simplifying, that is the thing, but then there is always the human who can't be relied on... ;-)
I have had significant problems earlier, but this one was perhaps more of an issue because I felt so tried. Once the hard disk in the iMac was corrupted, because a bookshelf which I was dismantling fell on top of it. Luckily I had a fresh backup for re-installing photographs etc.
@Cedric: Thanks, I hope the ending is good, at least there haven't been more problems.
I didn't take any photographs today, didn't feel like it at all. But I just helped my daughter to import 760 photographs to iPhoto in her account, she is rather productive with her LX3.
It was nice to see how much fun she and her sisters had looking at the photographs. She has taken photographs of her dolls and other things, and is using the face recognition feature to classify the photographs. Never would have thought about doing this...
A nice collection of photos on this day. I have been looking at your blog for a while but this is my first comment (I think!). I like your style and enjoy the images.
@John: Thanks! I like your style as well, couldn't help noticing the excellent 1:1 compositions and fine use of color.
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