ArtScottFoto

I bought a new internal hdd, wanted to prepare to set things up as Scott Kelby recommends, in his Adobe Photoshop LightRoom 2 for Digital Photographers. So I got it installed, formatted and working…...made my LightRoom file and started the transition from an external to my internal of all my files to clean the external drive. It was to become my backup photo drive…....I figured that sine LR wants to do back ups I would let it and not have to worry to remember after each time I am out shooting to back up….

So I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the transition still had around 4 hours to go….back to sleep….up at about 6:30am stil a few more hours to go….... did some errands and came back all done…well my format was just a quick and I remember I had had trouble with one that I did not do a full format on…..so I do a full format and then go back to my external to copy files again and they are gone…..they weren’t copied to the new drive but completely MOVED…....almost my whole 5yrs of shooting that was stored on the external was gone….only a few software files and word type files are left…....so frantically I start GOOGLING for recovery software, I have great recovery software for my memory cards but none for a hdd…....I am so sick to my stomach and there are clients portraits here also…...Oh GAWD what to do…....

Found a few claiming to do what I needed so I download trials…...finally would up with Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery software…....it seems to have worked great and it shows more files recovered than any other I tried so I purchased it for ~$40 as a download…....now my gripes…...I called their 24hr/day M-F number and got a damn recording…..tried live chat….IT IS ALWAYS OFF LINE…....ok I got all (I hope) of my files, unfortunately I do not know how many files I had on the damn system only an approx of GB’s and it seems real…...... very…...close.
I may wind up buying another software for more money later, when I fine someone with good customer support but for now my photos are back, raw files, tiffs,jpg’s, gif’s, png’s, audio and video files also…......but nothing is numbered as I had it cataloged…....it is just some foreign sequence of numbers….now the real work begins next week after my 2 newly ordered drives arrive for the splitting up of and re-cataloging of every photo and backing them up….with my whole jpg catalog going to my PRO Account on SMUGMUG and the ones for sale coming to Art For Your Walls 2 …..here on REDBUBBLE!!!!!!