p.2 #3 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
I'm curious how business insurance or a specific type of contract would help here. What could the OP be sued for, particularly if he gives the client a full refund?
p.2 #4 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
#1 define "owerwritten".
Things can generally be recovered even if they are overwritten from Hard Drives. Department of Defense standard is to wipe disk 5x with passes of all 0s then all 1s to make sure it is not recoverable for that reason.
With Flash cards it's a bit harder.
Hard drive sector can give hints as to what it's state was previously (0 or 1) because there are variances in how magnetized that 0 or 1 is as it gets written. With memory it's harder because it's not a magnetized/demagnetized material but it holds electric charge so I don't think it leaves much of a residue as to it's previous state.
So I hope it was from a HD and if it was a memory that you did not save anything over it...
PM me as many details as you can and I may be able to recommend something for you.
p.2 #6 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
abacus wrote:
Department of Defense standard is to wipe disk 5x with passes of all 0s then all 1s to make sure it is not recoverable for that reason.
Are you sure about that I'm not sure where that is stated, but it's still recoverable. TO remove the information all it takes is low level formatting. This is a rare understanding to most. Low Level formatting absolutely removes everything.
p.2 #8 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
I would find a firm that does recovery and send the card to them before doing any more damage. I had one that was totally dead. Not seen by the camera or computer and after 3 weeks returned all the images plus some that were erased.
Really can't see how a refund or free shoot would make a client happy. Spend what you need to get the best chance of recovery.
p.2 #9 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
On a CF card there is no way to recover information from areas that have been overwritten.
If you fill a CF with photos, then format it, and then fill it again, there's no way to get back the first files, because ALL the info on the disk was overwritten. If you format it, actually you can get all the info back. You can format it a thousand times, because normal formatting does not overwrite the actual data on the disk, but instead it just "marks" the disk as empty.
Of course, if you went 2 years ago on some trip and filled the card, and then formatted it several times, and since then you did not fill it up completely, the last portion of it is has never been overwritten again. This means that of course, you will be able to recover the data that was there. There is no magic around this thing. You can only recover the information that was written last on each "sector" of the card.
This has nothing to do with how many times you have formatted the disk, or whatever else. If the data itself was not overwritten, then it is recoverable.
I assumed that the OP did lost the files in the way that there is no possibility to recover. It the card was formatted, and the files deleted from the disk in the computer, there are acually high chances to get all back.
So, to the OP: If you did not fill those cards completely after that wedding, or you just had them formatted, you should be able to recover the images. If you deleted the files form the computer, of formatted that HDD drive (quick format, which actually just rewrites the FAT without deleting the data), you also can recover those.
Try this first before going to tell the bride & groom. If you already told them that you lost the files it's bad.
Your image and brand is worth more than the refund or whatever cost the data recovery would take. So even if it costs you 3 free weddings, you should still pay for your mistake and the bride & groom should not even know that something like this happend if you still want to be in this business.
PS: The Low Level formatting does exactly this: it writes zeroes or ones to all the disk, and this actually overwrites all the previously written information, so it is destroyed and unrecoverable.
p.2 #10 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
Do not TOUCH the disk which was overwritten. Unplug it this very second.
I've recovered overwritten and formatted files several times, and there is very good software out there (several hundred bucks) to do this.
If that fails, you will probably have a good chance in getting them back with a professional service, but this will likely be several thousand bucks.
Either way the chance of successful recovery drops dramatically if you do ANYTHING further to the disk. Unplug it this very second.
Wow, what a lesson.
Edit: CF card recovery is also able to be done and usually far easier. Same thing goes for them - don't even think about writing anything to them until you've attempted recovery. Buy new ones if you need them in the near future.
p.2 #11 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
Sandisk recovery software again! I got images from two previous weddings off of that program once! They are not necessarily gone. The CF card can hold thousands of hidden files even after they have been overwritten.
p.2 #12 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
Thanks guys. Yes, I'm a idiot. I used to do backups but soon takes things for granted. All the late night edits + dayjob took the toll on me and I messed thing up.
I was shooting with my new 5DMkii first time that day and was shooting sRAW + JPG.
I copied the files to my HDD and converted them using DNG convertor. Afterwhich I imported them into Lightroom and I deleted the JPGs and sRAW files. This is the part where I messed up and deleted the wrong files. Or I could have miss importing one of the CF cards and format/overwritten it with another shoot. I can't really remember. It was 3 weeks ago and I only realise I was missing alot of shots last night.
I tried some file recovery software and I did recover some JPGs but most of it was corrupted and cannot be opened. I tried Rescue Pro and do see some files in my CF card but it's filename is RAW00XX.TIF. I can't seems to open them. Is there extra steps needed to recover them with Rescue Pro?
p.2 #13 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
melvinho wrote:
Thanks guys. Yes, I'm a idiot. I used to do backups but soon takes things for granted. All the late night edits + dayjob took the toll on me and I messed thing up.
I was shooting with my new 5DMkii first time that day and was shooting sRAW + JPG.
I copied the files to my HDD and converted them using DNG convertor. Afterwhich I imported them into Lightroom and I deleted the JPGs and sRAW files. This is the part where I messed up and deleted the wrong files. Or I could have miss importing one of the CF cards and format/overwritten it with another shoot. I can't really remember. It was 3 weeks ago and I only realise I was missing alot of shots last night.
I tried some file recovery software and I did recover some JPGs but most of it was corrupted and cannot be opened. I tried Rescue Pro and do see some files in my CF card but it's filename is RAW00XX.TIF. I can't seems to open them. Is there extra steps needed to recover them with Rescue Pro?...Show more →
Many recovery programs will recover the files with different file extensions, i.e. not as a CR2 or JPEG. Download a renamer program, something like Rename4U. It will let you batch rename to the correct file extension so you can open the files with DPP or whatever. Best of luck.
p.2 #14 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
cordellwillis wrote:
Are you sure about that I'm not sure where that is stated, but it's still recoverable. TO remove the information all it takes is low level formatting. This is a rare understanding to most. Low Level formatting absolutely removes everything.
Not on any storage device manufactured in the last ten years (probably longer). Older drives (ST506, ESDI) were dumb, didn't have servo information on the platters and a low-level format really wrote new track locations on - modern drives just write fill in a similar manner to a normal write on a low-level format. The data can still be recovered by a good outfit (eg, Ontrack).
This is why when we destroy drives containing sensible information, we smash 'em with a hammer, cut 'em into bits and then burn 'em. Or pull 'em apart and dremel the platters.
p.2 #16 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
I've worked on this very problem before. Guy formatted the wrong drive and wrote some data to it and called to me to cry about it. Told him to just pull it straight away and picked it up. After some data recovery software spent about 24 hours chewing it over, he got 95% of his lost data back.
The disk recovery software walks through every raw block looking for files - and sticks them back together. It actually works.
p.2 #18 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
gfrasur wrote:
I'm curious how business insurance or a specific type of contract would help here. What could the OP be sued for, particularly if he gives the client a full refund?
Greg
Well, besides being sued for the money paid, you can be sued for emotional damages arising from having no photos from the wedding day. He was paid to do a job and (sorry man), but he didn't deliver what he was hired for.
The fact that he lost only some of them is a saving grace. From what I've seen in the courts, the photography has a higher inherent value then what the photographer was paid.
By the way, if you were a PPA member, you could send the card to drivesavers (the guys who pulled the data off the HD's from the space shuttle crashes) for $250 using their indemnity insurance policy.
p.2 #19 · Lost 40% of the photos. What should I do?
gfrasur wrote:
I'm curious how business insurance or a specific type of contract would help here. What could the OP be sued for, particularly if he gives the client a full refund?
Greg
I wouldn't want to wait to see what a lawyer and client decided I could be sued for. Better to be covered to being with. As I noted before, insurance could also pay for recreating the shots. Tuxedo rentals, venue costs, hair and make-up, etc.
i used that. for you windows users. i actually deleted the windows partition TWICE. installed AND formatted the drives to NTFS TWICE. it took about 4 hours of work but i got back every picture.
and my pictures were more important to me than ANYTHING. they were of my kids. to the tune of about 8000 shots i thought i lost. this software retrieved EVERY SINGLE SHOT (and some i didn't want) back. you need to be a little bit of a tech geek to understand it. but it's worth every single penny.
if you use this software, hint, use extension wild card searches, i.e., *.jpg, *.jpeg, etc., etc...
I'm not sure where that is stated, but it's still recoverable. TO remove the information all it takes is low level formatting. This is a rare understanding to most. Low Level formatting absolutely removes everything.