I had just finished with my subject, so I ejected the card and put it in the computer to see what I got. The compact flash card was empty. No data. What happened? I filled with panic.
What was on that card, I thought? I’d been downloading after every situation. The only data not transferred was of the young woman in the computer lab, the situation we just shot. There was not a bit of data on this card though. It looked like it had just been formatted. Had I done so by accident?
We couldn’t call back my subject, but I knew I had three days to reshoot her. I started Googling data recovery programs, and downloaded one right there in the computer lab. It found nothing.
That night, I tried two other programs. The last one I used, Media Recover, appeared to find the lost files. I paid for a license ($30), and it recovered 140 images. They were from last week's shoot at Wooster. The card had since been formatted, and these were the last images on it.
I looked through the previous card in my storage wallet. There were my missing images. I’d been searching the wrong card all along. But it’s nice to know I can now restore a formatted card.
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