[Leica] PAW Week 14 - Clive Moss accompanied by a whine

[clive.moss at gmail.com (Clive Moss)]

Last weekend was warm - and busy - walks, family events, etc. Shot a
bunch of happy snaps and uploaded them to the computer Sunday night.
The whine: Monday morning I woke up and discovered I was having a
stupid day. I worked my financial planning spreadsheet all morning and
messed it up very effectively.
Monday night I reformatted (stupid act N of the day) my Compact Flash
Card, took a couple of images, and started to look for my PAW of the
week. I discovered that all the pictures I had uploaded on Sunday
night had mysteriously disappeared. Nowhere to be found on my hard
drive.
My backup strategy had worked perfectly, and wiped them off the mirror
drive where I keep duplicates of everything. What I did have was
full-size previews in Lightroom, plus the knowledge that Lightroom
uses previews if a PDF document is printed in draft mode. So, I
printed the pics to a large PDF document, and recovered all pictures.
However, I wanted the raw files back, so I downloaded an evaluation
copy of a commercial file recovery package of good repute, pointed it
at my drive where the pictures were stored, and let it rip. Stupid act
N+1. It wanted several hours to scan the disk, so I went to bed.
Next morning it had recovered several tens of thousands of files,
given them a serial number, and asked me which I wanted to recover. It
offered to show me the first few bytes of each files - but no images.
I had no idea which pics were which.
Start again.  The card (which I had thoughtfully reformatted on stupid
Monday) was still around. Maybe I could get something off it. Back to
Google, found an OS X program offering image recovery at about 1/10
the cost of the general purpose piece of software, ran it against the
card, and recovered everything except the original file names.

So, here is the PAW. The final whine - I don't think it was worth all
that work. I had to whine, however. It is cathartic.

http://tinyurl.com/3of4c6

Critique and sympathy welcome.
-- 
Clive
http://clive.moss.net/blog/