Today I managed to walk around the stupefying WTC disaster site for half an hour, doing what a serious professional would be doing: taking dozens of careful photographs of the ruins. Then an NYC cop asked to see my authorization to be photographing a crime scene. I said nobody told me not to. He said come with me, and told a captain who asked how the fuck did you get in here. I said I just walked in, nobody stopped me. Captain checked my ID and my tale about safety-surveying the neighborhood as a volunteer, and said escort this guy off the scene. Then I was handed over to the State Police who had me repeat my reason for being there, took my fancy digital camera, looked at the photos and bygod erased all of them. Then I was handed over to the National Guard who is in charge of perimeter security, and I again had to explain that I just walked in, that there were no barriers and no guards the way I came. While that was happening two dozen victim families were escorted to the site to stare at the devastation, carrying flowers, weeping, holding each other, some stumbling, looking as if walking into hell -- which it truely is. Shit. I got my name put in a database and a warning to not come back or face arrest. I said thank you and did not even for a second think to say fuck off for which you may shit on me. Now the help I need is how to recover the erased images from the Compact Flash memory chip. Norton's unerase detects no remnants of the JPG images. I would really appreciate pointers on how to reclaim the images: they show godawful stuff I've not seen published anywhere else. No human remains as far as I can tell just dumbfounding acres of what used to be and the giant machines and tiny workers trying to untangle it. If anybody can tell me how to get the images restored I'll be immensely grateful -- technique or a program to buy. And I'll put the images on the Web as soon as reborn. They are high res images, 1MB or so each, and should be gruesomely spectacular, if only they can be unerased. Crime scene indeed. What I admired was the grandstand set up by the Port Authority for distinguished visitors to survey the spectacle and be televised saying how awful it is and how much money is need to rebuild New York and what must be done to prevent this ever happening again. That grandstand looked like the crime scene to me.
On Wednesday, October 3, 2001, at 05:05 PM, John Young wrote:
Now the help I need is how to recover the erased images from the Compact Flash memory chip. Norton's unerase detects no remnants of the JPG images. I would really appreciate pointers on how to reclaim the images: ... ... If anybody can tell me how to get the images restored I'll be immensely grateful -- technique or a program to buy. And I'll put the images on the Web as soon as reborn. They are high res images, 1MB or so each, and should be gruesomely spectacular, if only they can be unerased. Crime scene indeed.
Products like this one may help: http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/spec.htm And there are some tips I found with Google (searching on just "unerase flash memory"--other combos may give even better hits): http://www.imaging-resource.com/IRNEWS/archive/v02/20000922.htm#beg With this tip: Beginners Flash: Unerasing Lost Images It happens. "My name is [unintelligible]. I erased my media card before I copied the images." Hi, [unintelligible]. We all make mistakes. Before you panic and do something (else) foolish, work on a good excuse. Here's a starter kit: 1. "I thought you copied them." Where "you" could be anything from an African violet to a goldfish to a cat to a spouse or a long lost relative already framed on the mantel. 2. "I pressed the wrong button." Nobody has to know no buttons are involved. 3. "It said 'Copy.'" Well, desperate measures call for desperate acts. OK, now panic. Get it out of your system. If this is your first time (oh, there will be others), start by deliberately making the same mistake again -- but to a second card or floppy. You can try all sorts of techniques on the second one until you find something that works. The first thing to realize is that -- whether you are using a Macintosh or a Windows PC -- your storage device is (no doubt) formatted for MS-DOS. Macintoshes have no trouble reading and writing MS-DOS media (and, just for the record, PCs can handle Macintosh media with third-party software). But neither of them is any good at running disk utilities on the other's media. Your Norton knows your native file system, period. So recovery of a DOS-formatted card is a Windows task. Unfortunately, Windows may see your card only as a network drive (where, as with floppies, deletions are not safely buffered in the Recycle Bin). And it's rude to reorganize the directories of network drives, so your usual unerase utility may not go there. But there's hope. No guarantees, but hope. Although there's precious little hope if you've already stored newer images on it. Or just reformatted the card. But you didn't do that. So to unerase from your DOS-formatted card you'll need access to a Windows computer with a card reader and software that will recognize your card and unerase your files. There are a number of unerase utilities that may help. We know of one 64-MB CompactFlash card saved by the shareware program Recover98 (http://www.lc-tech.com/r98exp.html) even after a few new shots were written to it by a Nikon 950. We've had no success ourselves with MS-DOS Undelete, Norton Quick Unerase (which has trouble with files as large as image files) and Unerase or shareware like Directory Snoop (http://www.briggsoft.com/dsnoop.htm) -- either because they wouldn't touch a network drive or couldn't find the first cluster of deleted files. The freeware program Emergency Undelete for Windows NT (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/software/free/utilities/file/sw35.html) sounds promising, but we haven't personally been saved by it. If you have a success story with any unerase utility, let us know about it at editor@imaging-resource.com and we'll pass the information along. These utilities know a little secret: the data on the card is not really erased. It isn't lost until it is written over the next time information is saved to its formerly protected sectors. Instead, an erase operation simply frees the file's disk space, overwriting the file name's first character in the card's directory with the Greek character sigma. It's faster and just as effective. If not secure. To actually erase the file, you have to write over every byte. And more than once, if you believe certain U.S. government specs. (That's what the Norton Wipe command is all about.) If you're lucky, your unerase utility will just ask you for the first letter of each erased file name it found. And a few keystrokes later you'll have your file right back where you hoped it still was. We made the stunning revelation above that everyone (except goldfish) makes mistakes. It's our intelligence misfiring, really. So take heart! But if you're really intelligent, swing the odds in your favor by getting into foolproof habits like deleting images only in your camera -- using your computer solely to copy and relying on your camera to subsequently delete. While looking at your images on screen. From the CD you just burned.
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John Young -
Tim May