Digital Camera Flub Update

This post is to follow the blurb I had at the bottom of my post from Christmas Day. If you don't have a digital camera, or if you have a digital camera and know your stuff, or if you're already bored reading this, this post isn't for you ;)

So...here's what happened on Christmas. Our camera is a few years old, and we have always liked its performance (it's a Canon SD800 IS, if you're interested). However, recently, some of the shots have been a little blurry, or the lighting is a little weird, or whatever. So after the Christmas Day festivities Narasimha was absent-mindedly messing with the settings to see if he could figure out why these annoying things were going on. I think he was tired after the long day, and he happened upon the option to "format card." To say the least, the meaning of this action is lost on me. However, Narasimha says even now that he knew this was bad. He scrolled from the preset function of "no" to "yes" and pushed enter. Immediately the camera screen said "no files found." Which is bad. 2 seconds earlier we had several hundred pics saved on our disk. And they were all gone in an instant. He tried to retrieve the pics, and even downloaded some free retrieval software from the internet. Nothing worked. He found the number of a company who specializes in retrieving lost stuff, but when he called first thing Friday morning found out they were closed for the holiday until Monday. However, what he found out on the website was that there was some special reading software you could buy for $75, and if that didn't work, you could send your card to them and they would try to get it off for between $75-200-ish. Ouch. And, we weren't sure we'd get our disk back if we had to send it to them, and those are pretty spendy as well. Not to mention, no guarantees of success.

So we waited over the weekend, and Narasimha called first thing this morning. He talked to a guy who said it sounded like if anything would work, this thing called a "reader" (or something like that) would do it. No use sending it in. It looked for some reason like the computer wasn't reading our files (are you lost yet, because I was a while ago...). So we went to Staples this afternoon, and bought this like $15 thing. And it worked for the most part - Yay!!! Some of the pics have like inverted colors, and we're missing some we think, and some of them only load like half way for whatever reason. But I think we have about 90-ish% of our pics in tact. We're very thankful!

A few things we walked away from this now knowing: First, memory cards have a "lock" function. I knew that, but never used it before. This is good because you have to "unlock" (with the push of a little lever thing) to be able to do anything to your card besides add to it (so take pics, etc.). It's probably a little annoying and cumbersome at times, but it safeguards against accidental slips. Also, if anything (camera, computer, etc.) has technical functions with preset answers - you tell it to do something and it brings up 2 answers, no and yes for example, and one of them is highlighted - the one that is highlighted is generally the "right" answer unless you know what you're doing, or you're actually trying to do something specific. Our whole problem would have never happened had Narasimha went with the preset answer "no" for his little disk formatting escapade. This may seem obvious to some or all of you, but I am what you would call technologically challenged, and these little reminders will likely be helpful to me in the future.

Any suggestions or things to add? I hope this never happens to any of you.

*Note (as of 12/30): Locking the card doesn't actually work. When the card is locked (at least the one we have) it won't take or delete pics or make formatting changes. So nevermind that "advice" from above.