I hate to lose pictures. If someone gave me the choice of having my very expensive camera stolen or having my very inexpensive, (but full of pictures) CompactFlash card stolen, there would be a thief walking away with a nice professional camera and honestly I'd feel I got the better end of the bargain. Not that I'm in the mood to be mugged (especially not by a PDN reader—ahem) but to me the photos are priceless and a camera can always be replaced.

That is why I'm meticulous about backups and I’m haunted by things like the trip my wife and I took to New Orleans in 2003 that somehow didn't end up moving from my older laptop to a newer one. I've got a few low-res JPEGs up on photo sharing sites, but all those photos are gone. I mourn the loss of those images the way I'd mourn the loss of a pet. Almost. Just as bad though is when images vanish off of a storage card before they can be copied over to disc. There's a lot of complex mechanics at the heart of a CompactFlash card (or SD card, or MMC card) and sometimes things can just go vexingly wrong.

I like to think of the insides of a storage card as being like the inside of a parking garage, with each cell in the card able to hold one bit of information, just as a parking garage can only fit one car per spot. Parking garages track their inventory by use of a pegboard for the keys, each peg represents one of the spots, and this is analogous to the directory on the storage card. If someone were to walk into the valet office and knock all the keys off of the pegboard, the cars wouldn't suddenly disappear, there just would be no way of knowing which key went with which car until someone tried each and every one. That's what happens when a card goes bad, and there are a variety of software tools on the market designed to recover from that keys-off-pegboard style disaster.

One of my favorites is PhotoRescue by DataRescue www.datarescue.com/photorescue/index.htm. This off-the-radar company produces a photo-recovery tool that in many of our panic-attack-based tests have found images that other programs miss. The company just introduced a new version of the software today (3.1.3); it's a great tool to have in the old photo kit. It works with both Mac and Windows systems and is available for purchase online.