Unpleasantness in the Rearview mirror

You may remember that, back on June 28th, my remote hard drive died and took all my files with it. I detailed it some in this post. The two months before it went bad, I had spent most of my time scanning foils and Finests with the "new" scanner I procured. Then when it went bad, I was able to recover most of the work I had done, but not all. I don't know how many it was. I didn't keep track. I remember I had it up over 1000 scans. (even before the hard drive crashed I had begun working on the backs of them, and thinking it was too unwieldy and I wasn't going to do it that way again)

I have FINALLY finished recovering the foil and finests I had fixed, as of today, August 27th, a day short of two months to the day since my drive died.

It was a long, unpleasant process that has sucked a lot of the fun out of scanning cards for me, but I powered through and now, as it says in the title, I've got it in my rearview mirror.

Of course, it had to fight me right up to the end. Yesterday, when I was making the big push to finish them off, I knew I had some that I had to rescan as the original files I had created were just gone. So as I was finishing off the last pages of the backs to scan, I figured I'd do the page I needed to do of rescans. Of course, I then managed to discover that of the cards I had just scanned the backs for, three of them were ALSO missing so I had to make yet another scan.

That's life sometimes. It's been frustrating. But it's DONE!

Of course, my work on recovery is not anywhere near done...and I am not sure if it will EVER be done. All the cards I had scanned since October were stored only on the remote drive. The foils and finests were recovered fully (as much as they could be) but the other cards are all mixed in with all my other images. There were more than 300,000 images on the drive. Sorting through them is not easy because the recovery program put them all in one large file. Moving through them is a very slow process and they are not in any sort of order. Almost sort of the order of being made (either photographed or scanned) but not quite. The file is so large working on it makes my computer run slow and lock up. I do work on it, but I don't know if realistically my computer will live long enough. I've already had it since 2012 and they do build failure into them. I will keep trying, but it may come down to this: When I finish scanning my collection, which likely won't be until 2020 or later, I will sort them back into sets (for the first time since 2003) and then I plan to go through each set and see which scans are missing. That may be the only way. Time will tell.

In the meantime, I'm working extra hard to get everything I was able to recover uploaded to the Database and to Cardboard History II. Again, this takes time, but not as much time as it takes to create the scans in the first place.

Here are the cards I had to rescan yesterday. While it's a coincidence that there are 9 of them, a full page, they were not all originally on the same page as I had done the 1995 Zenith and 2015-16 Absolute Basketball with others of the same set. There were a couple more that I was able to pull from the original scans, as PhotoScape automatically saves originals. I have forgotten which ones they were now so they aren't included. There were three or four I was able to recover that way. I delete the originals periodically, but I had forgotten to do it for a while before the drive went bad so in this case it worked out nicely.

Being foils (and one finest style) they don't look anywhere near as good in scans as they do in hand. Anyone who has ever tried scanning cards knows exactly what I am talking about!