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This is a cautionary tale to be careful and wise with the data that you value! I thought I had taken every precaution against data loss. I had two external hard drives mirrored, which contained my massive 2.8TB Aperture library. Then I had two offsite backups. One backup was updated frequently as I ventured out and took pictures. The other one was only backed up about every 6 months. The second backup was less frequent to catch any hidden problem that revealed itself after a backed up.
Disaster begun to strike about a week ago. Shortly after importing several hundred pictures, one of the external hard drives suddenly failed with the telltale repetitive clicking. After a bit of investigation I realized that the drive was overheating and would not stay online, so I disconnected it. A year ago I had replaced a failing hard drive in the same mirror without incident. This problem didn't seem particularly alarming. Nothing was lost. I still had a redundant and working hard drive in the mirror. I planned on replacing the broken drive within a couple of weeks. But I didn't get the chance. I woke up three days later to hear the dreaded hard drive of death on the second external hard drive!!! No!!!!!!!
The last backup was already a week old! At that moment I knew I had lost some of my pictures. This is a more active time of the year for me to take pictures, so the timing could not have been worse. And I had just bought a speciality camera, the Sigma DP1 Merrill. The first few pictures from a new camera are always special to me. The electric excitement is a delight to reflect upon.
I wanted to try to recover as much as possible without taking on too much risk. So I reconnect the first failing hard drive and began an Aperture backup to my oldest backup. It was 8 months old and required several hundred gigabytes to be copied over. It was a tense few hours. I cranked the A/C and pushed the household temperature down towards 65F. I kept checking the hard drive by hand to see how warm it felt. Literally in the last 2 minutes of the backup the hard drive began to overheat! I allowed the backup to continue for the last few moments as the drive struggled to give up the remaining data. I was lucky with this failing hard drive. Occasionally hard drives fail in a temperature sensitive way. Most likely the electronics on the PCB board were failing and causing the circuit board to overheat. The second failed hard drive refused to startup, so I couldn't get even a byte of data from it.
I purchased a new 4TB hard drive and restored my Aperture library. The only problem is that I had several days worth of missing pictures, including the first pictures taken with the Sigma DP1. I was able to find most of the pictures that I had edited, but not the ones from my new camera. As a habit I always reformat SD and compact flash cards when I begin a new session. I knew these missing pictures should still be on a formatted SD card. First I tried a free recovery software called Photorec. I was able to successfully recover JPEG images, but not the X3F files. Those were corrupted in some unknown way. I was unable to open the these X3F files in either Sigma Photo Pro or other software packages. I even went so far as to pay for a commercial recovery product, Card Rescue. But it also recovered corrupted X3F files.
I was highly motivated to figure this out. I had the files, but they were invalid!! I began to experiment with another SD card and replicate the situation in which these photos were lost--take a few pictures with the Sigma DP1 camera; save the images to my computer for reference; format the SD card in the Canon 5D Mark III; use one of the software products to recover the files. I repeated this experiment several times and each time both software packages returned corrupted files.
I googled around for how to recover X3F files from a formatted SD card. I found at least a few other posts from people unable to recover them. I knew that I wasn't alone, but no one had apparently resolved this issue. Looking at large binary files is not a human friendly task. (If you are on OS X, I recommend taking a look at Hex Fiend.) After spending a few minutes comparing the binary files--the original and recovered files, I realized what was wrong. It was simple! The recovered X3F files were padded with a LOT of zeros at the end of the file. I thought it was weird that both software packages were doing the same thing. So I looked into the source code of PhotoRec to see how it worked. I found that the software does NOT inherently know how big a recovered file is supposed to be. It can only tell which sectors are associated with the file and assume every byte in those sectors belong to that file. Some file formats provide a file size and PhotoRec is able to utilize that information to trim the file during the recovery process. I looked at the source code for the X3F files and found that it doesn't determine the file size from the content of the file. However, it should be able to! I was able to locate information on the X3F Sigma RAW file. It shouldn't take too much work to modify the recovery software to read the header and determine the file size.
I did not want to wait around to modify the open source software myself or notify others about how to correct this bug. So I used the hex editor to remove all of the extra zero padding at the end of file BY HAND! It took several hours to modify each and every recovered file. In the end, I only lost a hand full of RAW images because they were corrupted due to being truncated.
I should follow up with PhotoRec and CardRescue and let them know how to correct their software to recover X3F files. If you are stumbling on this post because you accidentally lost X3F files on a formatted card and your recovery software returns corrupted images, you are in luck!! Simply edit the files by hand and remove all the extra zero padding on the end. It is tedious and not for the faint of heart, but it is do-able with a decent hex editor.
The picture you are looking at is one of the recovered images!! It is not the best work I have done, but I thought the story behind the picture was worth posting about.
As a final word, please make sure your backup solution is adequate!!
Sigma DP1 Merrill (fixed 19mm lens)
f/9 20 secs ISO 100
my identifier: f0596736a
Jumbo Shrimp - Slashø - 4/4/13
Ridiculous Fishing Fan Art
This picture is a Thank yøu to:
Vlambeer - vlambeer.com/
Greg Wohlwend - aeiowu.com//
Zach Gage - stfj.net//
Eirik Suhrke - strotch.net//
Maré Odomo - mareodomo.com/
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