Recovery

 I doubt many of you will remember, but back in 2016 I lost a LOT of files to a remote hard drive crash. In the post I link to, I talked about a program that was able to recover some of the files off that hard drive. What I never really followed up on though is that while I was able to recover several thousand, there were several thousand more still that I had thought I had lost forever and would have to rescan. I decided that I would deal with that once I finished scanning everything.

Fast forward to 2020. As I was stopping using my original Fotki for my card collection scans, and transferring them all to the Cardboard History Gallery, which I began to do in January, I realized that I had uploaded a bunch of them to the original Fotki, but had forgotten completely that I did that. I have to be honest, I hadn't really given much attention to the card back scans. There were scans that I thought were totally gone...still living in a less visited corner of my very own website. 

I set out to recover them. I thought I was doing good- I spent a whole month working on it...but then I discovered that I hadn't done as well as I thought. I had made a crucial mistake. I sorted them by upload date, and started from where the old device crashed. After I finished all of that- saving and relabeling them one-by-one, along with some of the recovered scans from the program mentioned in that 2016 post, which I have still not fully processed yet- and then I sorted them back by "title" and discovered that some of the earlier ones had been lost too. 

What was already a tedious and frustrating project turned out to be soul crushing. I set it aside then and had not gone back to it. When I got too frustrated, I had already recovered 7.092 scans. 

For several months I had been trying to work out a system to download the images in full from Fotki. Fotki does offer that feature, via an FTP server. 

The first one I tried didn't work. The second one I tried didn't work. I reached out to Fotki for help and it didn't progress much. It wouldn't work. I noticed on October 30th that Fotki had responded back to me in August, saying they had made a slight tweak and please retry again. I had been so busy with models I hadn't noticed. I did try, and success! I was able to download the back scans, which I did in full. 

As you can see, it was a heck of a lot of images. Rather than go through and try and pick out what ones I needed, I just downloaded all of them. It would be easier to delete the duplicates than try and mess with sorting them into another album and try to download them. Heck with that, it took me a month+ of frustration trying to do that already. 

I know there will still be some that I need to rescan. With the Recuva program I was able to recover some backs that the fronts are now missing on. I had a stash of scans I had not processed to Fotki, a different mindset that ended pretty much instantly when the remote hard drive died. And I know that this will take me a heck of a lot of work to fix in full. I don't expect to finish this side project in 2020. I may not even finish it in 2021 to be honest, depending on how my modeling goes, which is really how the weather goes. But there's no time limit. 

And this time they will be backed up in at least 4 places. 

And it's not just cards that this will help me with. I know several car shows had gone "missing", but really, only existed on Fotki. I will be recovering them as well...but first I have to sort the card scans out of the file they download into, which is now done. 

The one part of the downloading I don't like is that it doesn't save the name exactly as I had it labeled. It removes all spaces, as well as the # and ( )s from each scan label. Not only that, but it also doesn't save the name in full if it's too long. It makes some extra work for me, but I guess it's better than the Recuva program, which didn't save anything at all, just assigned a new number code to each scan, photograph and file. Like I said before, it's going to take me a while to full recover everything I can, but I will get there. Eventually.