Saved from the Abyss

 Perhaps an overly dramatic title, but it sure feels apt. You may recall that back in 2016, I had a remote hard drive crash and take some scans with it. I don't know how many, but...a lot. Well into the four digits. I thought I had recovered all I was going to be able to recover already, but as it turns out, I was wrong. 

I had a file that was labeled as "Check these", so I obviously knew there was something that needed to be done with them, but I wasn't confident of their being as useful as they turned out to be. When I was getting everything ready for my 5th Anniversary of  the Cardboard History Gallery I rediscovered this file, by which I mean looked at it for the first time in who knows how long? I don't even remember where I found it. After I took care of the album of stuff that I knew needed to be worked on, I decided to jump into this file and I'm sure glad I did! 

In total I was able to recover 1055 card scans and 14 packaging scans. That's a big deal, as it's both a month's worth of rescanning I don't have to do, and the packaging scans I can't recreate at all because I've since opened the packs! 

I was able to recover all these scans in 3 days time, so 3 days definitely beats rescanning them over the course of a month or more, since I don't always do that many scans in a month. And also, they are not all together (probably) and I have no idea which boxes they are in so I don't have to worry about digging through dozens of boxes looking for them right now- I can now stick to my original plan of pulling the missing ones and rescanning them after I finish everything and get the sets back together like they belong. 

The recovered scans weren't all back scans either, which is the majority of what I lost. In fact, I recovered front scans and back scans together of cards I didn't realize I had already scanned! In total I recovered 197 front scans, with most of them coming from the 2003-04 NBA season for some reason. 89 of them, and 115 of them if you include 2002-03 NBA and 2004-05 NBA season, which were the second and third most common recovery. I don't know why they are concentrated so much in this three year section of time, but I'm not going to complain, I'm thrilled to get these scans back. 

All of the scans were made with Scanner #3, which isn't anywhere near as good as Scanner #4, which I am currently using. I may very well end up rescanning some of them when I finish scanning everything and put the sets back together...but for now I am thrilled to have any scan for them, even if lower quality than what I can make currently. 

Some of the sets, I was only missing one known back scan, or multiple back scans, which have now been found, meaning as far as I know they are now fully uploaded of what I've scanned. I don't know if there are others that I did that were totally lost or this is truly everything I've ever scanned of them. Time will tell, but it's not going to be soon. And that's OK. I love the scanning process so I will continue to scan as much as I can, eventually I will break even and be able to get my sets back together. It's taken me 35 years to build the collection, so it's naturally going to take quite a while to scan it all.