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Restoring Lost Memories (Aka Accidentally Deleted Photos)

Next to dropping your camera in the water, the next worst thing has to be losing your memory- that is your camera's memory. All your photos stored on one little card, GONE!

An ounce of prevention

Don't buy the biggest memory card you can afford and try to store your entire vacation on that single card. Lose or zap the card and there goes all your vacation photos. So if you were thinking of getting one 32Gig card, buy four 8Gig. Same storage and certainly less risk.

You can use different strategies, like a different card on a different day, or different country. But, the safest way is to use the same technique used for mission critical hard drives- 'striping'. Never store all data from one destination on one card. So if you're taking a tour of Italy, say in Rome; take some photos of Rome on Card 1, then later in the day, while still in Rome switch to Card 2, later still to Card 3, and so forth. In Florence start with Card 1 again and rotate through the cards. At the end of the vacation, you will have stored all of your destinations at least once on each of the cards.

A loss of a single card will not be the tragedy that it could have been.

Daily Downloading

If you are traveling with your laptop, get in the habit of downloading the card to your computer daily.

If you still have room on the card, DO NOT delete the photos after downloading. Now you have the original and a backup.

If you must delete the photos to make room on your memory card, CHECK THE FILES ON THE COMPUTER. Make sure they are there. Make sure they are readable.

In lieu of a laptop you can use a portable hard drive, like the Photobank, meant specifically for downloading memory cards. It is smaller, light in weight and some models come with a viewing screen well worth the extra cost).

Insurance

If you have a good Internet connection, you may want to consider subscribing to an offline file storage service in "The Cloud". Services such as Picasa or Smugmug allow you to transfer files from your disk to a server somewhere on the net.

Delete All

Oops! We have all done it. Pushed the 'Yes' selection when asked to confirm deletion.

STOP! Pull the card out. Taking one more picture might prevent you from recovering the deleted files.

Calmly replace that card and continue taking photos and enjoy your day.

Back at the Hotel.

Using Card Recovery Software, carefully follow all instructions. The software will recover all the photos it can find on the card and transfer it to your hard drive or CD. Photos may be renamed, but they will be there. It can even recover photos from cards that have been formatted. With one caution...NO OTHER PHOTOS WERE TAKEN ON THAT CARD AFTER deletion or formatting.