Adobe Bridge Emergency!

[Jenenfelder]

I realize this is a Photoshop forum... but, as a photographer that has to sift through thousands of photos at a time, I'm hoping at least a few of you out there use Adobe Bridge with Photoshop as I do.

Anyhow... here is my situation.

I shot a wedding a week and a half ago and was going through the photos this past Saturday (July 7).

My process generally goes like this:
I go through each folder (which generally hold everything that comes off of a single 2gig card) and rate the photos. I then sort by the rating, cut the top rated, and paste all of the top rated from each folder in one collective folder. By the end, I therefore have one file full of my "favorites."

So here is the problem:
Somewhere along the line 77 of the top rated photos were lost. Just lost. They're not in the recycle bin, I've searched the computer... even for hidden files.

They're just gone. These are priceless moments I can't just go reshoot.

We ran a file recovery program, but it somehow just finds thumbnail renderings of any NEF ever deleted from the computer. Yes, it finds some of the photos that were lost... but there is absolutely no way I could ever pull anything out of what it "recovers."

So, I'm wondering if it's possible that anybody has heard of any sort of problem similar to this... or if by some miracle one of you knows how to retrieve my original RAW files???

If you don't know how to fix the problem, could you possibly suggest anyone that I could contact to figure this out?

[Jenenfelder]

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?128@@.3bc3f949

Just thought you guys should know... this is what I've found out so far.

[Medley]

Jen,

Thank you for the bug report. Although it doesn't affect me personally, I've passed it on to a few photography forum I use to try to prevent this from happening to someone else.

As to your dilemma, I've not had to use recovery software for some time, but the last time I did, this is the software that did the trick:

http://www.softwarepatch.com/software/filerecovery.html

However, there is a caveat. Most likely, the actual images have not been deleted, but your computer HAS removed access to them, and marked that space on your hard drive as usable. Therefor, downloading anything runs the risk of overwriting the very data you're looking to recover.

It may be worthwhile to look at taking the computer in to a repair shop. They should be able to link one of their computers to yours so as to access the hard drive remotely. Doing so would allow them to run software from their computer on your hard drive, allowing for maximum file retrieval.

In the meantime, the less you use the affected computer, the better your chance of recovering the files.

- Joe U.