Photographer Petra Hall‘s fiancé recently bought a used MG convertible right before going on a vacation. However, on the way back from work the weekend before the vacation was to begin, something in the car exploded and the car went up in flames.
The list of gadgets in the car is enough to make a grown man weep: a Canon 7D, a Canon 24-105L lens, and a MacBook Air. Everything burned up.
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SanDisk has just announced that Japan’s police force has adopted its 1GB SD WORM memory card for collecting evidence. The Write Once, Read Many cards are tamperproof, can only be written to using a WORM-compatible device, and supposedly stores data reliably for 100 years. Practically speaking, this means that photographs and audio can be collected onto the cards, allowing those who access the data later on to be confident that it wasn’t tampered or edited in any way. The National Police in Japan have tested the technology extensively, and seem to be convinced of SanDisk’s claims.
We can’t really think of any practical application for ordinary photographers (can you?), but it’s interesting to know that this kind of technology is out there and being used.
SanDisk just released its 64GB Ultra SDXC (extended capacity) memory card, the largest capacity for the Secure Digital format. It has a read speed of up to 15MB/second, stores up to eight hours of high-definition video, and costs $350. The new card uses the SD 3.0 specification, which allows capacities up to 2TB (2000GB).
It just so happens that today the CompactFlash Association also announced the CF5.0 specification, which allows memory cards up to 144PB (petabytes), or 150,994,944GB. Oh boy.
Sadly, the new Compact Flash specification only affords transfer speeds up to 32MB/s, meaning a full 144PB card would take about 153 years to transfer.
Here’s a story that’s sure to drop your jaws: A Spanish trawlerman named Benito Estevez was recently fishing off the west coast of Europe when his net brought up a digital camera from the Atlantic seabed.
Five photographs were recovered from the camera’s memory card, and included shots of a man and woman posing on the deck of a ship (seen to the left).
In one of the photographs (bottom), a woman is seen on the deck of the QM2 cruise liner, with the QE2 in the background. BBC News reported the story on television last night, and published it online early this morning. This afternoon, they reported that the owners had been found. A friend of the owners, living in England, noticed their photographs last night just as she was about to switch off her television.
Turns out the owners, Barbara and Dennis Gregory of South Africa, were traveling from New York to Southampton in 2008 when the camera fell overboard into the Atlantic. Mrs. Gregory says,
Somebody spotted dolphins in the water and the two of us jumped up and that was it. It literally bounced off his lap, across the deck and into the water with hardly a splash and it was gone. [...] There’s no way we could ever have imagined that this thing would ever turn up again. It sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. [...] You daydream that it might happen that these pictures are going to pop up somewhere, but you don’t think it’s ever going to happen.
It’s absolutely mindboggling.
We agree.
A few times in the past I’ve had to recover data from memory cards. Once it was a friend who accidentally reformatted the card and deleted hundreds of photographs from a recent vacation. Another time I accidentally deleted precious images from the memory card before I had backed them up. What I’ve learned though, is that in most cases, you can easily recover the data you fear was lost, even if you do something drastic such as reformat your card.
When you “delete” a photo from your memory card, it simply goes to that section of storage and marks it as “available” to be used again. The data of the original image is still there on your memory card, though the camera will not display it as an image. Thus, the most important thing you need to remember to do if you accidentally delete data is to stop using the memory card. This is because the only way for the data to truly become unrecoverable is if you delete it, then overwrite it with new data (or even blank data). Thus, to ensure that you can recover your deleted photo, you need to be sure to stop using your card immediately to ensure that nothing is written to that storage location on the card.
To do the actual recovery, you could take the card to a photography place and have a professional recover the data for you, but I’ve always relied on free software that can do the same thing. Here are some popular and free programs to try:
Most of the good, safe, and free programs available for recovering photos are available only for Windows users. PhotoRescue is a popular program for Mac users, but costs $29.
Finally, the fact that data is so easily recoverable means that you need to be careful when selling things like computers and memory cards. Simply “deleting” data will not prevent what was on the card to fall into the wrong hands. If you’re selling a memory card that contained data you don’t want others to possibly recover, then be sure to overwrite the card completely, or look online for a program that helps you safely delete data.
