I had a bit of a scare today. I was finishing uploading photos from my memory card to my computer today when the memory card said there were only 36 photos on it. This was definitely not true. Yesterday there were over a thousand photos on it, and while I deleted some of them after moving them to my computer, I definitely didn’t delete all but 36 of them. I tried everything I could think of: show hidden files, sort by every order provided, look in every folder on the disk, look at the properties of the disk to see if they were still there. The disk said 1.3GB were in use. The 36 photos still visible on my card certainly don’t take up that much space, so the photos were still there somewhere. The question was where.
So I installed Photorec, a program that recovers deleted files, on my computer and went to town. The website has a step-by-step guide to using the program. I should have known something was wrong when I followed the instructions and didn’t land where the instructions told me I would.
Bad news. I navigated every menu available to me and couldn’t find my way back to the step-by-step instructions provided by Photorec. Unless something amazing happens, I’m thinking my pictures are gone for good. At least almost all of them are backed up to my computer or somewhere online. The only photos of value I lost permanently are those from a friend’s wedding in 2009, and photos taken by other people exist and are accessible to me. That’s a loss, but at least it’s not as major as pictures from things that no one else around me took.
Learn from my experience: back up your stuff. Do it now. You never know when something bad will happen, whether it’s as minor as losing a few documents or as major as losing everything.
7 replies on “Back up your stuff”
That SUCKS. I had a USB stick fail me after several years of service this year. Thankfully, anything on there that I did not have saved elsewhere was unimportant. All because I have the important stuff either in paper form or in saved emails. I was very fortunate that way. Big sigh of relief.
@kamanislands Lucky you! Now I’m going to be afraid of my USB sticks failing me. 😛
@Sushi Haha, sorry. 😛
Oh my gosh I’m so sorry that happened D: Just last year in september my harddrive on my laptop just quite working. I took it up to apple and there was nothing they could do to save anything, years upon years of pictures gone. Writing and stuff, just. . . poof. I was lucky enough to have saved my most important writing stuff on a usb just minutes before it broke. I still have the the old harddrive in the hopes that when I get enough money I can get someone to get everything off of it if it’s not too broke.
I hope that you somehow find out what happened to your photos, I don’t see how they could just dissapear like that.
@BookOwl That is terrible! You’re lucky you backed up the really important writing, though. I know I’d be freaking out if that happened to me. All those years of noveling gone. I should email this novel draft to myself right now, yes?
And I haven’t figured out anything about it yet. The stick still says 1.3GB used but there are no pictures on it now that I’ve moved the remaining 36 pictures. Very strange.
Sushi, that’s rough! I’m always afraid (not a good thing) of losing things, expecially my writing since I invest so much time in it. I’ve been using Google Docs for the important stuff lately. You probably know about Google Docs, but I thought I heard you could put your photos there? Maybe there is a space limitation?
Yeah @kamanislands I don’t trust the USB sticks either! And to to honest, I often download the Google Documents, too, just to be sure. Talk about paranoia! Is it just me? Tell me it’s not!
@Lori @kamanislands Google does have a photos site, Picasa. The main things keeping me from using it as a universal photo storage site (as I mentioned a few days ago) are the really really long URLs and the fact that storage there is also included in your Gmail storage. I keep a lot of my email. So I’m scratching Google off my list of perfect photo webhosts. I’ve found a promising photo storage system, but it’s selfhosted. Looks like I’ll have some work to do.