Disaster strikes due to a mistake

by Stanley LearyPhotography
 

I was tired of working at my computer when helping a friend who asked me to help fix their jump drive. It needed to be formatted.

Well, it just wasn’t working at first. After a few tries, I finally formatted it, and since I was used to just clicking the drive and clicking go in a moment, I accidentally formatted my external hard drive instead.

Panic struck as I realized what I had done and what I potentially had lost. The only good news was I had just put this new 2TB hard drive into service a few weeks ago.

The worst-case scenario was I lost images I had not posted to my cloud servers, which were all the camera RAW files. Once I finish running them through Lightroom, I post JPEGs and keep the RAW files in several places.

Everything was gone, and I hadn’t had a chance to create a backup on some of the files.

 

Frantically I tried to use my PhotoRescue software, but due to the newer Mac 10.10.1 operating system, it wouldn’t work.

I then found Data Rescue 4. I had to run a deep scan, and it took 24+ hours to scan the 2 TB hard drive. I recovered 95%+ of the hard drive. The only thing is the folder and organization weren’t as I hoped, but all the RAW files and JPEGs were there.

Couple of points that you need to know to recover the most. First, if you make a similar mistake, I make the stop and immediately do not use the hard drive until you have recovered your files. Second, formatting is terrible, but shooting more images and writing those to the hard drive is even worse.
 
 
On the Mac, open system preferences and then click on Energy Saver.
 
 
Change the Computer Sleep to never when running the program. Could you put it back when you are done? I made the mistake of not doing this, so when I set it to run overnight, after about 15 minutes, the computer stopped running and went to sleep.
 
While I would love to say the moral of the story is never to do this, there are times you too may be so tired and not thinking straight and make a mistake as bad as I just did. However, there are solutions, and this is one that worked for me.