The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
9:26am on Thursday, 27th January, 2005:
Comment
I received a request for a digital photograph of myself yesterday. I'm asked for these fairly regularly (for conferences and so on), so have a supply of such images on hand that I can send out to whomsoever wants them. I went to my digital photos directory and ...
Uh?
It wasn't there.
My entire collection of digital photographs — which is to say pretty well every photograph I've taken in the past two and a half years — has gone. Pictures of my children, my wife, our holidays; memories of trips to Denmark, Australia, America; of parties, Christmas, visits from rarely-seen relatives. They're all gone.
I reckon it happened about 3 weeks ago, because I transferred some new pics to the directory shortly after Christmas and it was alive then. My guess is that I lost them by hitting the delete key when the window I thought was in focus wasn't. It was too late to effect a recovery: my Recycle Bin has been emptied several times since then, in order to install various games. I did notice when I added Tales of the Sword Coast to my system that there was more space available on drive C: than I thought there was. Now I know why...
I used an undeleter and managed to get back a few assorted images, but the vast majority were unrecoverable. I'm particularly annoyed that a collection of about a hundred 3D images disappeared, because I was about to write a program to create HTML files for them automatically so they could go on my 3D images page. Damn! The reason I hadn't written it yet was because I couldn't line up the pictures in my photo-manipulation software; this is currently out of action thanks to my broadband connection problems, which can be laid firmly at the door of Norton.
So it's Norton's fault.
I do have some backups of the early pictures, but none of anything taken in the past year. This was because my wife wanted to look through everything first to see what we should print, what we should keep and what we should throw away. She hadn't got round to it. Those photos were about the only stuff on my PC that I don't have copies of elsewhere (despite the fact that I've lost more work to the process of backing up than I ever did through accidental deletion or hard drive failure — even counting this obliteration of my photos).
Oh well, I'll know next time...
Referenced by Photo Recovery.
Referenced by Party Pics.
Referenced by Aurnie Vanne.
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Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).