retrieve pictures

The first few books I made I can no longer retrieve since my laptop crashed.  Everything’s gone… pictures and all.

I want to edit those pictures on books I already made.  Is this possible?????

Please tell me there IS a way….

Is your hard disk damaged or are the photos no longer to be found?

There is a shareware program I use called Don’t Panic (details here) that is designed to retrieve lost photos from camera memory cards. I had deleted some photos I’d spent a few hours working on (I still don’t know how I did that)  from my hard disk then, not knowing I had done that, emptied the Recycle BIn. So I though I’d try Don’t Panic on my hard disk, took about 9 hours to run  but it found my photos, and many 100s of others I didn’t want back – I had to trawl through them all to find the ones I wanted. If you have the patience give it a try.

On the Don’t Panic site you’ll see it says PC Edition coming soon, ignore that and download the Photo Edition.

If your hard disk is damaged there are data reovery companies who can still retrieve a lot of the data, they do not come cheap though as they may need to build a new disk using the platters from yours. The ones in the UK tend to offer a no recovery no fee service. Do an internet search for "hard drive data recovery" and you should find a few.

I’ve backed up my data to an external drive for many years, but I did that overnight on a daily cycle. I now back-up my photo library after every major editing session, as well.  And I don’t ever empty the recycle bin until the next day when I’ve checked the overnight backup went OK.

I’d highly recommend getting a external drive for photo (and other) backups to anybody who does not currently back up their photos. They simply plug into a USB port and are fairly cheap these days.  In the UK a 500Gb externnal drive is about £50, probably a lot cheaper in the US.

......Tony