I posted this morning with no response about how to recover any CF card images that have been re-formatted then over written. No response. Have tried several programs and looks like they are gone.

I am sure the lost images are my fault. So what to do.

I shot over 1,000 images and one of the cards had images that I shot before the wedding with the bride and brides mades and mothers. We toured the hotel at some great locations and I lost those images.

We have some getting ready shots, the ceremony shots, beach portraits and reception shots. what I lost was the images before the ceremony of the girls. They paid for a two hour package and I ended up shooting 4 1/2 hours. They wanted me to charge them for the extra time because they were late starting the ceremony and the 20 minutes we had scheduled for the ceremony turned out to be a 55 minute ceremony. We were short for sunset beach time so I had to go to another location to shoot the group shots at the reception.

And this was the most emotional and difficult bride I had all year. Figures it was the last wedding of the year.

She told me ahead of time she was not interested in a book but had already purchased an album that she wanted prints for.

I am not sure what to do about this. I was thinking I would just give her an image CD of all her images and not charge her for the extra time. She called the day after the wedding and just wanted me to know how excited she was to see the images of her and the girls. Those are the ones I lost so I know this will be a big deal for her.

Yikes. Any suggestions?

oh dear..

well all may not be lost. first - which programs did u already try?

second - if those dont work u may have to send the cards off to be professionally recovered which tends to get pricey..

third - is the card actually mounting when u insert it or is it not responding at all? have u tried different card readers, different computers?

I dont think all the options have been exhausted just yet..

That makes me queasy just thinking about it..... I would own up right away, but perhaps take a day to get the best of the other images worked up to show her, make a cool blog post and slideshow to send her at the same time you tell her of the error. Do you have any of the getting ready? My contract states that loss of images or failure to take them through some fault of mine is the only reason for any kind of refund (and then it's pro rated based on the percentage of missed coverage). It sounds like she got her money's worth time wise, but I would still try to find some way to make it up, like a really fun family day somewhere cool (on me) to get some more great family shots.

Remember everyone makes mistakes and no one died. Good luck.

~Bill

David... I feel for ya bud.
This happened to me last year, but it was my hard drive, not CF.

I spent thousands and the data recovery place could not recover the files.
So I ended up giving them whatever I had in prints plus all their money back (this was before I put that clause in my agreement). They too were very difficult to deal with before the wedding, I offered a deal since they were friends of friends etc. Just a big mess.

With that said, I think you should contact Scott Tallyn - Tallyn's Photographic

I'll pray for those files for you. Hopefully they'll get resurrected.

Tim, he said he wrote over it with new images. If it was just reformatted then it's fairly easy to get the files back. But if you wrote new ones over the whole card then only a very specialized data recovery center can recover them (think NSA).

Ah man! I am so sorry to hear this! That is my nightmare.
I think that once they are overwritten by new images they are gone, data recovery isn't possible when they are re-formatted. Call up one of the data recovery places to be sure, but I am fairly confident they are toast. Sorry.
I would at least offer a family photo and another session with the B+G and probably give a bunch of free print credit. It would be super bad for your reputation if it got spread around that this happened and you didn't do enough to fix the situation. Don't give the farm, but you should probably be pretty generous.
So sorry about it. Try the technique of either using two CF cases (one for full, one for empty) or try flipping over your cards when they are full. And never EVER format at a wedding. Do all your formatting beforehand so if you need to format you know you shouldn't.
Good luck and let us know how it turns out. I hope I am wrong about the recovery.

I had a 300gb hard drive get accidentally formatted and written over and I thought I lost all the data... I tried about a dozen recovery programs and found one that got over 80% of the images back!

I'll log on my notebook in a minute and look up the name

EDIT: This is the software that I used that got back most of my 300gb of lost data

Thanks everyone for the support.

I have shot over 1,000 weddings and am so careful. I do have a case for all the cards and I do flip them after I use each of them.

I had a moment. after over 1,000,000 images I had a moment. Well I did do a slide show for her right away and I will do whatever I can but I feel so bad. I will still have over 800 to 1,000 good images and I did take shots of the bride and all the girls at the reception so I covered everything except a 15 minute laps.

This should be a wake up call that no matter how careful you are take your time and be careful.

I do not mind paying to have the files recovered if there is a master recover place but I did wright over the card. I formatted it and then shot over it. I ran PhotoRescue and recovered the gettting ready shots but the other shots now have shots over them. I think it is hopeless but again if therel are any "Jack Bauer" recovery guys out there or any top secret " CTU" programs out there (can you tell I am gearing up for the new season of 24) then please let me know.

I know this is going to sound obnoxious, but, it's kinda nice to hear that a major photographer who has shot countless weddings makes mistakes too. By the way what does "flip" the card mean? Sorry to hear about this... booooo!

You put the cards in backwards/upside down so that you know that card's been used already.


That does suck bad, I don't even know what to tell you to do... that's my worst nightmare.

Best of luck David! I know that simply formatting a card doesn't always mean you lose the images. I had plastic cases that I kept my cards and flipped them as well (label side out=unused, label side down=used) AND no matter how fast and furious things are going, once I insert a card, I always look on the card for images, and reformat for the specific body I'm using. I know this isn't news to you, but recently someone on OSP turned me onto the PocketRockets by ThinkTankPhoto.com and they are very much worth the few dollars to purchase. They hold 10 cards and they tether to your belt so there's no losing them. Best part is one slot per card so no stacking up. Check them out.
Thanks for sharing!
Good Luck
Michael

Have you tried this yet? I think Brady might be onto something here...

SOOO sorry this happened to you! I will be thinking of you - hope you get them back!

Formatting only clears the directory; the files are still there. However, when you shoot more, that will most likely write over files that were there before (depending on how much free space there was and how it was allocated). And while the NSA can get back info from magnetic media that has been written over, I really doubt even they can salvage anything from flash media.

I would try a couple of other recovery programs and see how they do.

And there is a lot to be said for taking backup shots with a second body. There's only one shot where that doesn't help - the kiss.

oh dear..I didn't read this before! Shooting over the card..yea i've done that..im so sorry to hear this

It does depend on how many images you shot 2nd time. It will overwrite and permanently destroy as they go so if you shot a full card it's toast.

If there's any recoverable residual after this re-write process that would be shocking, but I'm not a recovery authority so don't want to make blanket statements.

Wow, 1,000,000 images! Guess you were bucking the odds? At least it wasn't the ceremony. Even no-fault failure can happen (albiet usually recoverable). Loss, theft, etc. Does make a case for those portable iPod style backup hard disks.

You have a 2nd shooter or 2nd camera for at least a few images of those happenings?

I feel for you. While I've never had it happen (yet), I was curious what I'd do if it ever did. I filled a card (with nothing important), reformatted, and started shooting again. I probably filled it 1/3 of the way the second time. Lexar's Image Rescue (comes bundled with their professional CF's) recovred almost everything from the original shoot. Some were lost and some were incomplete images, but the program worked like a dream and recovered most of it. Then I repeated the process and added another reformat/shoot. Obivously it recovers less with each succeessive time, but it worked for me.

Planning for the worst...hoping for the best.

Good luck.

--J.

I have nightmares about this kind of thing... never happened to me yet (***knocking on wood***) and am so paranoid that at the wedding before the reception or whenever I have a few minutes of down time I back up filled cards on the laptop (don't format the cards though) then when I get home I put the RAW files on my working drive, back up the RAW's to the back up drive, and burn a copy of the RAW's on DVD and keep them off site... Overkill? Probably... but I never want to make that call to the couple.

I feel for you David, you went above and beyond what they paid for so hopefully it shouldn't be a huge issue... but people are people and it could be a nightmare.

Good luck!!

Ugh I feel your pain. I have not yet had it happen, but I am sure it can happen to all of us at some point.
Hope you will either recover them or find a way to make the bride happy.

i'm coning a little late to this discussion, but hopefully still in time. i just want to add that professional file recovery places CAN recover files that have been overwritten (reformatted AND then written again). i don't understand the science behind it, but i have heard of several photogs who have had to send cards to have stuff recovered and they would often get back the most recent set of images as well as some from the session before that. and somewhere (probably in the vaults of the NSA) there's technology that can recover data that's been overwritten 6+ times (and maybe more?). That's why the strictest security measures recommend overwriting a file 35 times for it to be completely unrecoverable!

-dave