My Tale of Woe

If you just deleted and didn't write anything else to it, you should be able to recover it.

I have recovered stuff off of cards that have been formatted in the camera.

I burnt to dvd's. Checked them and they worked. 8 months later the person wanted some prints. I pulled the photos from the dvd and 17 of the RAW files weren't able to be brought back for some odd reason.

That's why they went on an external harddrive.

Burnable DVDs are not nearly archival enough. They are designed to be burned at high speeds, so the dyes are not even as stable as burnable CD dyes! We have a collection of VCR tapes of children's programs, and I tried to burn some of them to DVD in the event that our VCR committed hari kiri one day. I recently have discovered that several of the DVDs which were burned several years ago and verified as working, are NOW NOT WORKING!

Wilt wrote in post #9246145
Burnable DVDs are not nearly archival enough.

Quoted for truth. Optical media that you burn yourself is not for long term storage.

With the trivial cost of hard drives these days (compared to the cost of even a Rebel, let alone a xxD or xD) it's definitely worth it to set up at the very least a hard drive for backups, and probably RAID as well. You can get 1.5 TB for ~$100 now, you have NO excuse not to back up to a hard drive. For example, the MTBF on this Segate that's currently $100 on Newegg is 750,000 hours. That's over 85 years. How long do you think your optical media will last? How about flash media? Certainly not that long. http://www.newegg.com …tb-_-22-148-412-_-Product

firstclass wrote in post #9248614
Quoted for truth. Optical media that you burn yourself is not for long term storage.

With the trivial cost of hard drives these days (compared to the cost of even a Rebel, let alone a xxD or xD) it's definitely worth it to set up at the very least a hard drive for backups, and probably RAID as well. You can get 1.5 TB for ~$100 now, you have NO excuse not to back up to a hard drive. For example, the MTBF on this Segate that's currently $100 on Newegg is 750,000 hours. That's over 85 years. How long do you think your optical media will last? How about flash media? Certainly not that long. http://www.newegg.com …tb-_-22-148-412-_-Product

+1

My only disappointment with external hard drives as "backup" media is the trash enclosures the manufacturers use.

I've had two Maxtor OneTouch III drive (a 500gb and a 750gb) both "die" less than a year after purchase. Two huge heart attacks since the 500 died a week after a huge dance recital and the 750 went out a week before the latest recital. Fortunately both drives were actually OK, in both cases the USB adapter inside the enclosure croaked.

I've looked into "online" backups (Mozi, Carbonite, etc), but none of them are really viable since I've already amassed ~ 750GB of RAW and processed files that need to be backed up (yeah, I could live without the processed files in a pinch - but thats less than 20% of the total).

Until I find something workable the pile of hard drives will continue to collect.

mbellot wrote in post #9249045
My only disappointment with external hard drives as "backup" media is the trash enclosures the manufacturers use.

My solution to this is to not use external hard drives. I buy only internal drives and have one of these. http://www.newegg.com …ck-_-17-153-071-_-Product

Just have a stack of internal drives around and pop them in as needed. If they are true "backup" drives, then you should only need to access them infrequently, so you don't need or want constant connection to you machine. Backup means they're away from the primary machine except when you're actually updating your backup.

As an added bonus, internal drives are cheaper, so you buy one dock and a lot of internal drives, and don't waste money on an enclosure for each drive.

I read the entire first post and im thinking 1GB cards? full Hard Drive? What is the 2004?! and then I look and it is.