Recovery Complete!

 A long and arduous task is finally completed, as I finished the Recovery project that began all the way back in 2016! I finished at 12:22 AM, on December 23rd, 2020, and it's such a great feeling to not have these hanging over my head anymore! 

In all, I went through roughly 100,000 images, possibly more considering I went through each one at least three times. In the last month! 

While there are some images that are truly gone forever, I was able to recover a lot more than I thought possible...there's literally years worth of rescanning I won't have to redo, I suspect. 

In all, from the download I posted about last month, I was able to recover 3006 back scans and 1061 front scans. Of those front scans, 929 of them were NASCAR. I knew NASCAR would require the most effort, and that proved true...it actually required more than I thought going in. It appears I had done some scanning work that I had forgotten doing, which meant more recovery work. but that's not really a bad thing. 

But that's not all...I also did some manual recovery, which required right clicking and saving images off my original website. I worked on that in the spring and early summer before realizing I had made a huge mistake and walking away in frustration. Not quitting- just needing a break from some soul-crushing work, mind you. 

Those numbers, at least for the back scans, are much larger, with 7076 backs recovered, and only 15 fronts. Of those 7076 back scans, all but 28 of them were NBA. I tackled the largest part of my collection first. 

I wish I had kept track of how many I'd recovered before this year, as it's a project I've been working on on-and-off since 2016, but in 2020 alone I recovered 1076 card fronts and 10184 back scans! That's a lot of scans! Considering that I do on average 54 cards a day (108 images as I do both sides) that's a significant amount of work saved. 11,258 scans would take me about a year to make, I'd estimate, if I had to do them now. Sure, sometimes I can push harder and do almost 200 cards in a day (400 images), but that's extremely rare and requires just the right combination of things to happen, and it happens less than 1 day per year I think...I don't really pay attention to that. It's such a rarity. 

I'm estimating that the truly gone forever images are about 300-500 cards, and many (actually most) of them are only missing the backs. That's a lot more palatable. I know now that while I will get them rescanned, it's not going to be any time soon. It's not going to happen until I finish scanning everything and get my collection sorted back into sets, something it hasn't been for the NBA since 2004, NASCAR since 2009, Non-Sport since 2010 and NHL never. There's a good chance I will not finish that project this decade, even though the 2020s have just begun. With the return of my modeling skills I spent less time on cards in 2020 than I have since 2008 or so. 

The numbers above do not include the Hot Wheels cards, which I discovered I had not uploaded to the Cardboard History Gallery during the course of this project, partly because they were never uploaded and partly...mostly...because they did not have to be recovered, except 1997 did. 1998-2000 were in my "needs more research before posting to the Database" folder, and it was during this project that I discovered checklists had been posted for those three years (although only 1998 was done well). 

Not only did I recover the card scans, I also recovered a good number of packaging images. While I didn't keep them in a separate folder (which is how I was able to get the numbers in this post) I believe I was able to recover 388 packaging images as well, but the number could be off a little bit either way. In December we started working on the storage units and I found a bunch of packaging images that all went into the same folder as the ones I recovered this month, a grand total of 750 images (but probably going to rise higher with Christmas). 

While I was expecting to find cards with missing back scans, I also came up with 85 card backs where the fronts are gone! That was a total surprise to me and I have them in a folder clearly labeled "Missing sides" so when I get back around to them in a few years, I'll be able to just scan the side I need and use the original back scan. There's also one set where I was only able to recover some of the packaging, that's a trickier situation, since the box is somewhere in my storage unit, waiting to be rediscovered...It's a set I got for Christmas circa 2013 or 2014 so I have not seen it in a while.

Since there's been a whole lot of talking so far, but nothing to look at, here's a screencap of the card fronts recovered. 

As you can see it's NASCAR heavy but everything is represented here- the four main pillars of my collection in NBA, NHL, NASCAR and Non-Sports, as well as Other Racing. I did recover some multi-sport, baseball and football in the back department, but no fronts there. 

Come January 1st, all these cards will begin to be integrated with the Season/Topic, People and Team albums on the Cardboard History Gallery, as well as whatever else I've scanned this month (including the aforementioned Hot Wheels cards) as well as the packaging images going into their respective albums. All of the scans are already in the Sets album. By time this post goes live, they will also be backed up on my Amazon drive, something I was a little lax in doing in the past...which is how I got into this mess in the first place. Since I finished this project at 12:22 AM, I have scheduled it for 12:22 PM, because that's the kind of weird stuff I do. 

Come back tomorrow because on Christmas Eve I will be opening and posting about my Trading Card Database Secret Santa package, which took the place of the Blogger Secret Santa this year. I've been holding on to it since December 1st when it arrived, so I'm really curious to see what's in there!