Still geocoding

Today I was still geotagging photos from the Bavaria holiday.

I had a big problem in that a load of photos had gone missing. I narrowed it down to that only some of the photos from my 8GB Sandisk card had copied across. Unfortunately, despite copying the card separately to two different hard drives, the same photos had not copied either time.

Since some of the photos had copied, I didn't realise at the time I was copying the card that most of the photos weren't being copied. I tended to just start the copy, then do something else for a bit, and then come back and check that the copy had finished okay. I didn't check the file sizes of copied folders, only that Windows said that they had copied okay with no errors.

So I tried various data recovery programs on my Sandisk 8GB card that hadn't copied properly, but none of them could find the photos. (I had re-used the card since). Eventually I tried using a recovery program on one of the hard drives that the images had been copied to.

I am extremely thankful that worked, and it recovered all missing images except one. The one it didn't recover was part of a bracketed set, so not particularly important.

What I think happened is that I was copying the images across from the memory card to one of the external hard drives. But the hard drive became full part way through the transfer. Because the transfer could not complete, Windows deleted the copied files from the card and the hard drive for some reason. So when I then copied the card to the laptop hard drive and the other external drive, the card didn't have the images on it that Windows had deleted.

But although Windows had deleted the files from the external hard drive that got full, the files were still recorded on the drive so that the recovery program could restore them.

Anyway, I am just really relieved that all those photos hadn't disappeared completely. In future I will have to check the size of the folder on the memory card before I copy it, and then check the size of the copied folder to make sure it has copied okay.

In the evening today I also made a cake.