Never leave your digital camera containing irreplaceable pictures from your recent trip to Italy in reach of a curious 4-year-old.
After four days, some tears, money, and an immense amount of guilt fueling my efforts, I have successfully dredged from the bowels of the empty memory card about 90% of the Italy photos Lance accidentally deleted from my mother's digital camera. Deleting the entire memory card in one go is a complex process and I have to fiddle around with the camera every time I attempt to do it, so how a four year old pushing random buttons in an attempt to take a picture can do it is beyond me.
There was an air of panic Monday morning when I went over to my mom's house to offer to take her memory card to Costco to have all the pictures burned to a DVD and I learned what my little boy had done. In my mind I thought, "that's too bad and I feel terrible, but Amy (my sister who also went on the trip) took about 1600 pictures while there, so at least they have those." They had just returned from the week-long trip the Saturday before and I knew Amy was anxious to download and print her pictures. I mentioned this glimmer of hope to my mom to which she replied that all Amy's pictures, save about 100, had been corrupted by her computer and her card was now unreadable. I couldn't believe it. Thus began my week-long journey to recover as many pictures as possible.
Our saving grace: a program we downloaded off the internet from cardrecovery.com. It brought back 90% of my mom's deleted photos and almost all of Amy's corrupted ones! Amy had even taken her card to BestBuy where they told her there was nothing to be done except mail her card to some obscure place and pay $300. So, if by chance you delete your memory card by accident, this program worked wonders!
Moral of the story--never leave your camera where your kids can reach it. Or, teach your children not to touch your camera. That's probably the better idea.
That would be scary! I'm glad you were able to figure out how to get most of the photos back.
ReplyDeletePhew, that was a close one. I can commiserate with your stress - a few years back, I thought I had recorded over a 2-hour video of an interview with Chris's grandfather just before he passed away. Fortunately I was wrong.
ReplyDeletep.s. Love the title photo of Jude!! He should be a baby model.