We just spent two days on the Canadian side of the Niagara gorge to help celebrate Canada's dropping ALL of their Covid restrictions for their and American citizens wishing to cross the border! We stayed at the Sheraton Fallsview hotel, within walking distance of the Rainbow Bridge, and with fabulous superb views! Drove the next day to Niagara-on-the-Lake to see Fort Niagara from the "ofther side" and it looked just as lovely, but renovations have been in progress on the French Castle, so it wasn't a very photographic subject....
Snapped over 300 memories on the camera, including on the phone, then come home to find out I cannot find the images on ANY of the SDcards used, of which I only used two! Looking everywhere to see if a card got lost, got mixed up with other... you know the nightmare. The next day after arriving home, checked the car.
Nothing.
So this leaves only one course of action of take: undelete and recovery. This has happened before in my far past and recently even, but the most I ever had to recover was on an internal hard drive when I accidentally deleted over 30gigs while working on image files at 3am, still then in the San Francisco Bay Area! It took days to recover all that!
I use a great app that I discovered decades ago and have used it much and still. It's Puran software and they make a variety of apps including a handy-dandy app that allows right-click for adding a copyright, resizing and more to image files! It stopped worked about half a decade ago due to some updates/changes in Windows OS. I tested each app extensively but it would NOT work at all. A few months ago I upgraded to Win11 (which I tolerate and do not enjoy), and I rediscovered these right-click apps during a casual search of old files. Just for giggles I reinstalled them and voilà, it functioned superbly right off the bat without even having to reboot or anything!! WoW!!
Back to my current day nightmare of finding the Canada image files... I went through a possible five cards that I just cleared of files yesterday; the culprit was the second card checked!
LUCK! As I type this, there are now 200+ recovered image files of our Canada trip restored! Whew!!
Another thing I have noticing is that MANY of my image files are fragmented, not due to being overwritten BUT because I don't simply delete, BUT move my image files off the SDcards used in my cameras. In doing so, I have created SD cards with a lot of fragmentation, which I am seeing now! So, to prevent this in the future, I will start formatting each card after the files are moved off the cards! I could suggest you do the same, but you are smarter than me!! ;)
Again, the Puran File Recovery app has saved my Life and image files yet again!!
20 minutes later: over 1400 image files recovered! It seems since I started NOT regularly formatting my SD cards, the "image files" are still on the cards though not displayed! I finally stopped the recovery process after it had recovered and placed more than 1900 of these lost but now recovered files in a folder. Of all the image files recovered to this folder, only 1000 files were of our recent two-day Canadian trip. The others are all files moved from the card but never permanently deleted, and not formatted. So, I'll begin formatting my cards regularly very soon as I formerly did regularly a decade ago!
Some of the files were even snowy scenes at the Falls recorded during the last Winter!!
