So I must admit. If you are here for the usual recipe or restaurant review, today’s post isn’t for you. But I just couldn’t let this go without voicing the problem I’m currently having with technology – and I’m hoping that somewhere out there in the blogosphere someone else might have had this problem and can give me tips – or just confirm what I’m slowly starting to realize – that I may be completely out of luck on this one.

It all started with good intentions. I decided to spend the weekend hyper-focused on some new recipes and some new restaurant reviews so that as we get into the holidays I can have a couple recipes banked and can actually spend time with my family and not be connected to the computer. The next few weeks are packed with holiday parties, I have friends in town this weekend, so I really wanted to try to get a head start on some new recipe ideas.

And Sunday was one of my best shooting days in a long time. Those of you that take photos know how crucial light can be, and Sunday the light was coming in just beautifully through my kitchen windows. The kind of light where you know the photos will look terrific – and they did! Some of my favorite photos I’ve taken so far as I start to learn more about this camera. And then Sunday night as I decided to load and look at my treasure trove of images, I noticed something strange. All the photos from the weekend were not on the card. Thinking the computer was still asleep from my previous working session, I ejected the card and put it back in. Still no  photos. I took the card out of the card reader and put it back into the camera. Surely there must be some mistake, I thought. There’s no way every. single. photo. I snapped this weekend is gone. When I put the card back into the camera it took a while to load the images – flashing it’s little thinking light for a while. And then – bam. No photos. This is about the time I wanted to start crying.

Since Sunday, I have tried two different software downloads for SD card recovery. One found some photos that I had at one point deleted, but not the photos I’m looking for. I’m contemplating buying card recovery software and even taking it into a data recovery shop that had good reviews on Yelp. Is it completely insane to take the card to a data recovery shop? Maybe. But I REALLY liked how my photos turned out and when I get something into my head – they can’t actually really truly be gone right?  – I basically don’t give up until I’ve beaten my head against the wall enough times for the truth to sink in.

And I know, I know – there are so many worse things that could happen to me right now and I may be freaking out about nothing. But to me, it wasn’t nothing. It was hours of time and effort and work to have a little bit of freedom over the holidays to do nothing but enjoy my family’s company. And what really irks me is that I have no idea what happened so I have no idea how to prevent it from happening again. The fact that any time I might want to load my photos they could all be gone is really terrifying! Has anyone ever had this happen? Any suggestions on why it may have happened in the first place? If I can’t recover the photos, I really want to know how to prevent this from happening again!