Stupid Tax

In our family we have coined a phrase called "Stupid Tax". Stupid Tax is the amount of money you have to spend to rectify something you did that was stupid and you should have known better. Such as driving your vehicle on a beach that you haven't tested the firmness of the sand, the tow truck fee to pull you out would be stupid tax. I'm sure you get the idea.


So let me tell you about my latest venture into the realm of stupid tax. In this current heat wave I woke up Tuesday with a migraine, it was a beaut and so I took the day off and lost much of the day to quiet, cool, dark places. On Wednesday I didn't need to start work until 12:30pm, so after I dropped Beth off at the library, I thought I would work some more on the pictures I took in Ireland.

Now to explain a few things first, I have a DSLR camera and I take my pictures in RAW format and convert the keepers to .jpeg for show. As the camera is digital, I probably took close to 4000 original images before I started paring numbers down to what I am happy with. This takes a fair amount of time and I was well into working in to the second week, in fact I really only had 4 days of images left to check over, delete the unwanted and convert the rest.

So I had just finished the next days worth of pictures and was in the process of converting 183 files to jpegs when I got a message that said my hard drive was full and it couldn't save the last 30 pictures. Well as this was actually my C: drive I new I had room on my D: drive so I copied over the last 4 files (days) to my D:drive. Having done that I went to delete the 4 files off of C: to get more room until I could figure out where I was going to store these pictures in the short term.( Long term storage is in an external hard drive networked to the laptop ) I then looked at the files on C: saw that four were highlighted and promptly hit delete. Now this was 11:45am, I'm 15 minutes from leaving for work and my head is still a little fuzzy from the day before, a message pops up that says the recycle bin is full did I want to permanently delete these files. (can you see where this is going?) I said yes and 30 seconds later the files are gone and so are the other 10 days worth of pictures  as I have just permanently deleted my total camera file and not just the duplicate files I had intended to erase. In a word $$&^$^#*&*%!

Now I am in panic mode, I start emailing the world about what I have done and what I should do, I have 10 minutes to try and think this through and wait for replies and I can feel my blood pressure just start to climb. After 3 minutes of WTF and what should I do, I remembered a few things I was taught 20 years or so ago. Most of you computer geeks, nerds and specialists will undoubted be shouting to me as you read this that things aren't really deleted, they are just stored differently until overwritten. (yes that is a simple explanation sheesh). So I jump on this thing called the Internet and start up whit the statement " I just permanently deleted  files how do I recover" and all kinds of information pops up. Taking the next 5 minutes or so to check out what I would consider credible sources, I came across a free program that was highly recommended. So I down load the program on a stick, fire it up, low and behold it showed me that indeed most to the pictures, I had lost are there. Wahoo. Careful not to download anything on the laptop, I put things to sleep and leave for work 15 minutes later than usual and arrive, swipe in with about a minute to spare Whew.

So Stupid tax, the purpose of the blog. You might think that the stupid tax in this case is the frustration, time lost and time to recover( they recover at a much slower pace than deleting) time to re-sort and possibly rejig these pictures and you would be right except there is another cost or two.

Let me go back a step or two, after I fired up the program and it told me files were recoverable I then went to work. Upon arrival at home I went to start recovering the files. WELL it seems that the program is only free if want to see if the files are there if you want to recover them you must by the PRO version at $39.99us. Now there is no point in knowing that the files are there and not being able to recover them and I could have waited until morning and run down and picked up Larry's copy of a similar program but I pushed the STUPID button and i didn't pay attention to the STUPID message so $39.99 didn't seem to bad a tax to pay for this stupid persons mistake. The other cost is I did loose some pictures. As I write this blog and I have recovered over 1100 images and even more .cr2 (RAW pictures) but even in the short time I took to grab the program and stop downloads I have maybe 10 pictures or more that were either of poor status and unrecoverable or had already been over written and I am still looking for one complete day. That might be the hardest tax to pay.


Bill