We just returned from our Spain/Morocco ETBD trip and it was fanstastic! The only fly in the ointment was about a week into the trip, another memeber of our tour was trying to be helpful with an issue with my camera and invertently reformated my memeory card and lost all my pictures from the first week. (Yes that was me sobbing in front of the Alhambra but pulled it together for this amazing place.) Not being much of a camera person ( I have a Cannon Powershot XS 120)I asked for advice from the camera people on the tour. I took out the memory card and replaced it. According to some people on the tour the pictues may not be lost but might be retrieved by someone who knows what they are doing. Is this true or should I just chalk this up to a learning experience? ( I will have access to other people's pictures but there are obviously pictures that no one else will have.)I know this is not a photo site but you guys seem to know alot about everything related to travel.
Posted by
Bloomington, IL, USA
9371 posts
Same thing happened to my dad in China. We put in a new card immediately. When we got home he took it to a camera shop, where they retrieved every shot with no trouble.
Posted by
Pensacola
9110 posts
With little or no knowledge of anything electronic, I'd suspect that 'reformatting' probably didn't happen, even if it's possible to do from the camera.
What probably happened was something like "erase all'.
If that's the case, the pictures are still in there somewhere (since you didn't overwrite them with more photos), just the identifier to get to them is gone.
There's probably a geek (or a ten year old kid) that can solve the problem in a couple of seconds.
Posted by
New Paltz, NY
9110 posts
If the card was "quick" formatted or the files were simply deleted, you can recover all of the pictures.
This windows program will recover the pictures for you:
http://download.cnet.com/Search-and-Recover/3000-2248_4-10217825.html?tag=mncol
A lot of camera stores offer this service, but all they are doing is using the above program. It's really easy do on your own PC.
Posted by
OH, OH, USA
1158 posts
Wow! I would be pissed.
Formatting and deleteing are 2 different things.
The 1st one will delete your files "semi-permanently" so to speak. The second one will allow you to recover the files.
Not sure if a camera has 2 kinds of formattings quick and full, but when it's about a hard drive in both cases files are deleted sort of "permanently" and you need a very powerful and costly software to recover files after formatting.
There is some free software you can use to recover deleted files. Worth to try, nothing to lose anyway.
Posted by
St. Louis, MO USA
1976 posts
Hi Gail. I am traveling to Europe in about 3 weeks with a new digital point-and-shoot camera (I have used a film camera for all my previous trips) and am worried about something happening to my memory cards. I have set up an account on Flickr, a website where you can post pictures and invite people to see them, as kind of an online storage area while I'm traveling. It's free and all you need is a Yahoo e-mail address (I have 2 as junk e-mail addresses). That way, if anything happens to your camera or the memory card, you still have your pictures online.
Posted by
Los Angeles, CA, USA
27 posts
Hi Gail, try to download a free data recovery software and scan your flash drive and see if it can detect the images from the drive. Usually when you format or delete, it doesn't really delete the 0's and 1's (geek talk :-P) from the drive. The only way you can really erase data from a drive is to write all 0's to it. So, you'll have a good chance that you can still recover most of your photos from the flash drive.
To Sarah, invest in a large capacity USB flash drive and backup all your pictures every time you access a computer. Uploading photos to a site like flickr sometimes takes too long to upload.
Posted by
St. Louis, MO USA
1976 posts
P.S. - I found out a couple days ago that Flickr only allows you to upload 200 pictures per month. I guess in normal circumstances that's fine, but not when you're on vacation and you take as many pictures as I do! If you have a Facebook account, you can upload as many pictures as you want. But I think I'm also going to bring CDs to copy my pictures to, in case anything happens to my cards.
You can buy memory card readers, which have a USB drive at one end and at the other end are slots for different kinds of memory cards. Like a flash drive, the software is in the reader so you should be able to plug it into any computer with a USB drive and upload your pictures from the card. I tested my reader on my computer and it worked just fine. I'm glad you posted this question - you're giving me important ideas to consider and you're probably helping lots of other people as well.
Posted by
OP
Atlanta, GA, USA
62 posts
Thanks for all the helpful advice. Just to update, I took the memory card to a camera store and they were able to retrieve all of my photos. It cost me $28 bucks (nothing if they couldn't do it) and they put the pictures on a DVD. If I were more computer saive, like my 4th graders, I might have tried the free software. I was thrilled to get my pictures back and will never let anyone touch my camera again! Thanks again for all your help. I am already planning our next trip-looking at Eastern Europe( and will have a way to store my photos as we go)!
Posted by
Burbank, CA, USA
86 posts
So happy to hear of your "happy ending"! And thanks for taking the time to let us all know. It's always nice to know "the rest of the story"!!
:)
Posted by
Boulder, CO, USA
780 posts
Another hint if you want it. I always print out my photographs at a one hour photoshop wherever I am. You dont have to wait an hour, you can always pick them up the next day. I use Snappy Snaps in London and the pictures are beautiful compared to Walgreens or Target!
That way if something happened and things got deleted, I would at least have prints for a photo albumn!
Posted by
Tampa, FL, USA
417 posts
What a relief! And in my opinion, $28 is a deal to retrieve them all. Well worth it, I am sure you agree.