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. 

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! 

Well, that was frustrating.

 I decided to work hard on the recovery project, and it's going fairly well- since the last post about it I've recovered over 800 scans. I've finished the NBA section, which I knew would be hardest, and I was able to do hockey in it's entirety on Saturday and Sunday. Since the problem occurred right before I got into hockey officially, I knew that all the cards should have been in one 5000 count box, which is where I stored my officially scanned hockey collection up through the 2018-19 season, when I filled the box. I have not been through the early part of the box since 2017, only adding newly scanned cards since then. 

I came up with 15 scans that were lost forever. I am actually pleased with that number. 15 scans, that's less than 2 full pages, I can do that. I decided to get the box out, pick out the cards that needed to get their backs rescanned, and knock them out, making hockey fully complete, with no scans missing. 

Of course, nothing ever comes easy. I went through every single card in the box, twice, and remember, this is a 5000 count box...and three of the cards weren't there. There is no possible way this should be. Every card from before the crash would have been scanned before I got into hockey, and therefore they should have been in the first two columns, as that is what was done before the crash. 

Oddly enough, all three missing cards are from 1992-92 Upper Deck. 

I have absolutely no idea where they are. I do have a theory though. I pulled some of the cards aside and sequestered them in a "Scanned- needs replacement" box, which is where I was putting cards that were in low condition but I scanned them anyway. The problem: I don't know where that box is at the moment. That's the problem with using identical boxes for everything, sometimes getting my hands on a specific box can be troublesome. There is also the possibility that they were in one of the overflow boxes, of cards scanned after the crash. They shouldn't be, since they should have been in the 5000 count box, but if I replaced them with better copies later they may have gone in one of them. If that's the case, I'll find them eventually when I sort everything. 

There's an even lesser chance that I accidentally put them into one of the NBA, NASCAR or Non-Sports boxes. I doubt that would have happened at that time- I kept everything separate, but I may have made a mistake. 

The possibility I really don't want to think about is I may have mixed them into my duplicates. I'm almost sure I have two of the three rattling around my duplicates, provided I didn't give them away last Christmas.

I will probably go through my dupes box and pull them out if they are still in there just to be safe. One card is a Gretzky, and one was my first Gordie Howe card, so kind of important there. Can't get to that easily right now but I have taken notes in Excel for when I can. 

But hey, while I'm upset by not being able to find those three cards, I WAS able to find and rescan the backs of the other 12. I actually misspoke a bit- one of the backs didn't go missing. It was corrupted. I had it the whole time, it was simply unusable. 

These are all the scans I had to recreate. The Laflamme is the one I had the original of but it was unusable. 

I believe that every single one of these cards was a gift from my friend Ricky back in January 2015, that formed the basis of my NHL collection. 

Since I wrote this post, I've also finished checking WNBA, baseball, football and college basketball. I expect that I'll be sleeping when this post is published (I'm scheduling it) but I will probably still be in the middle of multi-sport cards. I expect that to take a couple of days. After that, Non-Sport and NASCAR, which will be challenging. I'm sure I'll have a post about that when I'm working on it or done, NASCAR will provide some different challenges not found in the other sections.