Back from the dead and jumpin' all over the place.

I bet you have heard about all sorts of horror stories on the internet about scandals from looted pictures or videos and posted over Youtube or Flickr Etc. Even as I'm writing this, there's a feature story on the local news today about tales of men and women whose home movies are posted on the net for blackmail and other illegal pursuits. Many even go to great lengths to produce a DVD and sell it underground.

Imagine you have all your private pictures of you with your partner taken with your digital camera. You download it to your computer and format the memory card right?

Then along came your sister, cousin...______ (fill in the blanks) and borrowed the camera from you. Then you found out the next day that the borrower...

lost your camera somewhere!

Like in the mall for example.

You start thinking to yourself... I Erased It Anyway Right?.... Did you really? Well my friend guess what? 

All your pictures are still there!!!

Back from the dead and wreaking havoc like a virus spreading itself all over the internet. What's that? you don't believe me?

Well there are dozens of software out there to do the job of recovering photos from a formatted memory card, but I found one that's even free. The software is from Recuva Software. You can download it from here.  There are hundreds of these software available online, but I'll save that for another post.

Most of the digital cameras I've tested does a "soft format" and i.e. data or photos can be easily retrieved... although I've encountered an old digital camera that really wiped out everything when you do a format command "in camera" so that you may not be able to recover anything - even with recovery software (more like an exception to the rest of the digital cameras that I came across with) 

That is why its important to test out your newly formatted memory card from your digital camera and know for sure if it does "leave something behind"...

for all the world to see!

"Only the Paranoid Survive" - Andrew Grove, President of Intel at the time he wrote This book.

Peace.

P.S.  Here's a little something from my "I told you so" department. According to the local news I mentioned earlier... The men and women involved are now effectively restricting/hiding to the confines of their homes because they are so ashamed to go out. Some confessed they are even considering suicide. Yikes!

Sounds horrible, doesn't it?  Don't let this happen to you.

The next post will address this problem so stay tuned or subscribe to my feed at the top right corner of this blog so you don't miss this.

P.S.S. Did I fail to mention that on the other end of the stick... this would be a very useful post...

If you accidentally formatted your memory card! 

and somebody forgot to tell you that the card contains all the pictures from your wedding anniversary. Nice work GENIUS.