A dubious advantage of digital photography
A few days ago, we discovered that a large collection of digital photos from the last three months had gotten composted. If I was using film, that would be it; no negatives means I'd have to dig through whereever the city of Portland dumps its trash to recover the silly things. But, fortunately, these are digital images, and even though they were nowhere to be found on my fileserver, they'd passed, like a particularly lumpy meal, through the innards of a Windows machine.
Yes, I'd deleted them from the windows machine. But, fortunately for me, since I had not yet gone and blown away Windows and put a copy of Unix (linux, freebsd, netbsd, MacOS 10 -- it doesn't matter, since none of them have good undelete capacities) on the box, it was still running windows.
And you can get undelete programs for windows. Some of them are even free (which was good, because after spending a few hours downloading "demo mode" copies of the commercial software and discovering that each and every one of these demo mode programs would only recover files up to a whopping 64k (and how many files on a windows box would be less than 64k? I believe the number you are looking for is ZERO. HTH!) bytes long, I had decided it would be a cold day in hell before I forked out US$50 for a program that I couldn't even verify as working before paying for), so I logged into the windows box as root, set the moondingo cache to 0 bytes long, and cranked up one of the freeware undelete programs.
Which has been running for the last 72 hours (12gb disk + freeware == as slow as moral values in the Republican Party), and has successfully picked up about 1500 images (with around 900 being real images and not just jpeg debris piled into a heap and called a .jpg) A good reason to use digital? Yes (the jpeg compressor in my Pentax *istDS is claimed to be inferior to the jpeg compressor in the equivalent Nikon and Canon SLRs, but most of my pictures are immediately shovelled onto the web, where "image quality" is but a dim memory -- I can take some small comfort in hosting my own images and not having to subject them to the tender mercies of something like flickr Yahoo's image hosting service, so I can post easily accessable huge copies of my inferior jpegs -- and when I save them as jpegs, the data recovery software can easily [but not quickly] pick them up), and it's also a good reason to use Microsoft's Bigotware, as much as it pains me to say something good about a company that's in bed with bigots.
Eventually, I'm going to revert my home fileserver back to Linux (because Linux has an lvm disk subsystem that works, unlike the superscary FreeBSD one(s)) and then I can drop a 300gb disk in to /home and do netapp-style snapshots every half hour for the past 360 days and then I won't need the windows file recovery part of "digital being better than film", but in the mean time the sluglike operation of the data recovery program is a far happier thing to see than the back end of the Heiberg garbage truck taking my negatives away to a dark and desolate grave.