Living through a data loss

I just lived through every photographer’s worst nightmare: data loss.

Over the last few weeks of Thanksgiving celebrations, I took a ton of pictures at three different community events where I volunteered. Thankfully, I transferred all the files to event owners right away, except for one. After arriving home, at a leisure time, I started cleaning up the folders on XQD and SD memory cards. In that process, I hit the delete button without selecting a folder. To my gasp, I realized what I have done and tried undoing it quickly, but by then it was too late. All the pictures were gone. I frantically downloaded different applications found on the internet to restore. These so called free applications gave me previews. I could see the pictures clearly, I was happy. Sure enough as soon as I clicked the restore button, they asked me to pay, eek! They are free to preview but not free to restore 😐

Then I came across this CNET review of Recuva software, which in itself has very mixed reviews. So I was reluctant but I thought to give it a try (I guess I could have paid for one of those apps to get them restored for this self-inflicted pain.) Thankfully it worked, I was able to restore 95% of the lost pictures. I thanked the heaven and said to myself, never again hit that “DELETE” button before copying them over to a cloud or to a local drive. Lesson learned!

P.S.: My wife is reading this while I am typing with a ‘dun, dun dun’ and in an overtly dramatized voice 🙂

Latest: Turns out human error seem to be one of the main causes.  

Read more about it from this article.