Homer's Travels: 2010 Vacation: Jordan - Recovery

Monday, June 21, 2010

2010 Vacation: Jordan - Recovery

We got back home late last night from vacation.  Jordan was great and I will post about it over the next three or six weeks.  Today, Monday, was reserved for recovery.

In the case of this vacation, recovery pertains to two different issues.  The first is the one familiar to almost anyone who has taken a vacation - you often need a vacation to recover from the vacation.  Jordan was no different.  For me this recovery is more difficult than usual because of the eight hour time difference and the resulting jet lag that I have never experienced to this magnitude.  I think I am recovering better than I expected but I still feel like I'm in a fog.  I'm sure it will take a day or two to get everything back on rhythm.

The second issue that I'm recovering from was unexpected and very disappointing and ate up most of my day.  I took some 636 pictures in the six days we were in Jordan.  When I got back I discovered that 284 of these were corrupt and unviewable.  Yep, 44% of my pictures went *poof* into the ether.  Now, I suspected that something was wrong when I was taking pictures, and I'll talk about it in future posts, so I wasn't totally surprised today but I did have some hope that I was wrong.  I wasn't.  The files are corrupt.  Damn.

I spent most of the day downloading photo/file recovery programs in the futile attempt to recover some of the lost pictures.  Fortunately most of the programs are free to try out (you only have to pay to save the files) so when they didn't work I was out nothing.  I tried out three and had the same results.  The files are of varying sizes and appear 'normal' but they are not recognized as an image.  I suspect that the problem is with the memory card I was using.  If any of you have any suggestions for a utility/program that may help me recover my pictures, please share in the comments.

To top it off when I plugged the card into the computer to copy off the files, my virus scanner lit up like a Christmas tree.  After I first suspected a problem, I'd gone down to the hotel business center to see if I could view my pictures (I couldn't - no RAW viewer).  Apparently I infected the camera card and my USB thumbdrive with four viruses/trojans.  Fortunately my virus scanner caught them and disposed of them for me.

As I said, I will post more over the next few weeks.  For now I'll say that I had an awesome time, experienced a lot of firsts, and saw a lot of interesting things.

3 comments:

  1. That really stinks about your pictures!!! I'm glad you had a good time though, and hope you get a lot of time to sleep and recover from your travels so we can read about your exciting adventures!!!

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  2. Hmmmm... You might have to look into one of those professional drive recovery services, though I don't know how much they charge. Did you have the camera set to save both RAW and .jpg, and only the RAW's were corrupt? Beyond that, without the card in my hands to play with, not sure what to say...

    Despite that, looking forward to your pictures and tales of worldly travel!

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  3. Miss McC: It took a few days but I think I'm back on Central Daylight Time.

    GH: I thought about that but there is a limit on what I want to spend. I was only taking RAW, no JPG. I've tried some more photo/file recovery software (a total of five different programs). All the recovered files look identical to the last picture I took - almost like the last picture overwrote everything.

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