10 Steps to Avoiding PC Disasters: Day 7
PC Disasters Day 6: You Lose Your Digital Photos
Digital photos and photography have spelled the demise of cameras that take film for the most part (just ask Kodak). But because digital photos are so easy to take and upload to your PC enmasse, they are also easy to accidentally misplace or delete. This has actually happened to me several times…
I’ve uploaded a camera full of precious digital photos of my family to my PC, and then deleted them off my camera’s media drive since they were loaded into Photoshop on my PC. I figured I’d be safe, but when my PC crashed after only being able to save one photo to the hard disk, I learned a painful lesson: NEVER delete the photos off your camera until you are certain copies are safely stored on your PC’s hard drive!
Fortunately you can now use an undelete utility on your camera’s media card as an easy way to recover lost or deleted photos, just like on your hard drive. The only catch here is that the photos should be recoverable as long as you haven’t written over any deleted photos on your Camera’s media card by a newer image.
There are several recommended utilities for recovering lost photos from your hard drive or media cards found on Cameras, thumb drives, etc. One good utility is called Active Undelete 5.1 (costs $40) and can be downloaded at www.active-undelete.com There are also a few free utilities like Zero Assumption Recovery: www.z-a-recovery.com. You can simply launch the program and navigate to your Camera’s media card, select ’simple scan’ and browse the deleted files. Simply select a file to undelete and click on ‘Recover’.
We have developed the habit, as mentioned above, of simply not deleting photos on our digital cameras until after we’ve uploaded and saved them on our PC’s. It only took one time losing 50+ photos of our two daughters to cement that habit firmly into our minds when dealing with digital photos. Perhaps the easiest way to transfer photos to your PC is to simply dump all of them into a central location on your hard drive, and then open up and edit/rename/manipulate them.
Make sure you protect your digital photos and other data by having backups also (we save all our photos to a DVD writable disk once every few months). Redundancy in backing up your data is the best policy, even though it is slightly inconvenient.