Everything Street Photography

really sorry to hear that. i've had a few near misses in the past, but thankfully with minimal loss. however sometimes it take a situation like this to make you realise the true value of your images.

hopefully everyone who reads your post will take on board what has happened and reveiw their own backup procedures. this is not only relevant to digital files, many film users keep all their prints and negitive in the same location, you should consider seperating negs and prints ( by physical location if possible).

As far as digital is concerned consider purcasing an additional external usb drive for backup, 300GB cost less than £100 ( $180 or so) make a complete backup after any major shoots or changes. you may also consider storing your files on an external web server, most ISP offer unlimited webspace and the files do not need to be published if you do not want to share them.

last couple of points ( promise).
if you decide you really want your files back, make sure you use a reputable company for recovery not just the local IT company ( trust me thats who i work for ;) ). i have used data clinic before http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ they manage to recover some rather large databases for my company before. generally these companies will change to analyse the disk give you a list of recoverable files then charge recover per MegaByte.

finally don't think it's a new camera you need but a new PC ( with some extra disks)

hope you get somewhere with recovery, let us know how you get on.

cheers
martin

I hope you find a way to recover your files, I hear it's possible so don't give up quite yet.
As far as storing film, don't forget about fires and floods. Martin suggested saperating negatives in different locations but that only protects some of the negatives and not all.
I scan my film in high resolution and make a few back up copies on DVDs which I give to a couple of friends, one of them is in a different state.
so if I ever lose the physical negatives I will still have the digital copy which is obviously better than nothing.

what about the photos you took in New York? any survivors?

New York is completely lost unless I get the drive back -- however, it's looking pretty good at this point. I am trying some utilities I found online and one of them (R-Studio) said that it could recover most everything. So, I paid the 80 bucks for it -- a small price if you ask me -- and it's currently trying to copy over what it can. I see the filenames flash by on the screen and it LOOKS like it's doing a good job so far, so we will see! I'll update you when it's done...it was a big drive so it'll take a while.

Martin, the funny thing is that I JUST got a new computer last week. But, the drive the photos were on is an external one that I've had for quite some time. And yes, I know the camera isn't related to the problem at all...it would have been more of a comforting purchase than a practical one. :)

Well, I got lucky -- it took almost 15 hours to restore the files to a clean drive, but that's fine with me! There were only four files (out of 77000 on the disk) that it couldn't restore, and I don't think any of them were photos. So, I'm a very happy man today!

glad to hear that, sounds like 80 bucks well spent. lesson learnt i guess, i'm off to backup my pics just now!

cheers
martin

ps. you should still treat yourself to that camera :)

:)