I am the go-to guy for many of my friends and family when it comes to computer help. I can build PCs from scratch. I can solve many software problems, I just know technology and more importantly, computers. So, when I have an issue with my own equipment, it is normally no big deal. That is, until I accidentally format a memory card for my camera before removing the 1800 plus pictures from said card.

Yep, I had that “OH CRAP” moment last week, and let me tell you, I am still kicking myself for this. 1800 pictures from the Side-by-Side fundraiser, Boys Golf, Baseball, Softball, Tennis and another story I was planning to write, gone, just like that.

We all have those moments of panic, my heart darn near stopped, a few colorful words flew out of my mouth, and I felt so dumb. Then I said out loud, “Dude, you’re the one everyone comes to help for this kind of stuff, do your thing.”

So, I did my thing.

I tried all the recovery tools I have in my possession. I have several paid versions that are supposed to be fully functional, “we can help you save the world” types of software. I can recover files from a broken iPhone, a formatted hard drive. I can recover deleted files as long as nothing was written over them. But I could not recover data from this Compact Flash Express A card.

Why? Memory cards are different animals. Secure Digital cards, known as SD cards, use a specific configuration of cells that when charged with electricity, hold data. SD cards start with an internal controller and that controller is what allows data to have the chance to be recovered if there is a failure somewhere. That controller also plays a role in how fast, or slow the data moves during both writing and reading.

Digital photographs have come a long way regarding quality in the past 25-30 years. That quality comes at a price and that price is file size. The largest file size my camera produces is nearly 100 mb per image. Standard SD Cards work okay, but the newer technology of the CF Express cards is at least three times faster for both reading and writing, which makes the camera work much better, but the controller of the new card does not have data protection if you do something like format it before making sure the pictures are saved elsewhere. That is the price paid for faster speeds.

That is exactly what I did. I sat down, put the card in the computer, spent a few minutes organizing the pictures into folders and then I got distracted. My process is in place to prevent this from happening, but much like Doug from the movie Up!, I saw a squirrel and that was all she wrote.

When I got back to my computer, I assumed that the files had been completed being moved from the card to the hard drive, and since I had been having some small issues with the camera, I formatted the card. Then, when I went to work on the pictures, they were nowhere to be found.

Wondershare Recoverit, Disk Drill, Get Data Back, iRecover, plus a bunch more are all programs to recover data. There are more robust and thus, more expensive software titles out there that can do even a deeper scan of devices, but these home use programs do a good enough job at recovery that they can at least give you hope or take it all away.

After spending all day on recovery attempts, I hit my wits end and made the call, time of death, 18:13. Then I sat there sulking and dumbfounded that I could not fix the issue. I could not save my 1800 patients. Then the light bulb went off and I thought, maybe in this case, I am the problem. Maybe this is beyond me, so I reached out to the professionals, a data recovery company that is nationwide with an office in St. Paul. It was after 7:00 p.m. on a Thursday when I completed their intake form, so I did not expect a response that night.

I got the phone call Friday afternoon; their tech Brandon had some questions for me. The first was, what happened? I was dumb and formatted the card before moving the 1800 pictures off of it.

Brandon, “Ouch… The card was working normally before the format and you didn’t write anything to it since, right?”

As if I would do a second dumb thing… well played Brandon.

I did not do the second dumb thing, but I respected the tech-to-tech banter. Brandon’s next question was the most revealing and in the long term, good for my mental health and confidence.

“What have you tried so far? Disk Drill? Wondershare Recoverit?”

I replied with “both and more.”

“Sorry brother, there is not much we can do if those programs all gave you the same answer,” Brandon said as if I just lost the family dog, and he witnessed it. “Those programs do a solid job at recovery, and it sounds like you did everything right. We can still look at it if you want us too, but know, it is 600 dollars upfront, and I doubt we will find anything.”

New time of death, 4:35 p.m., Friday, April 11, 2025.

I thanked him for his kind words and politely declined shelling out six Benjamins for a nearly zero percent chance at recovery. The pictures were gone, and I learned a hard lesson.

The good news is, 95 percent of the pictures are of sports that are still going. Sure, I won’t be able to get the exact pictures of Cole Karnick and Colton McKnight hurling fireballs against St. Thomas or Haley Strain baffling Tartan, but I will be able to get pictures of them and the other teams in the upcoming weeks. Most importantly, they were not pictures from a game being played as part of the state tournament.

The sad one is the loss of the side-by-side fundraiser pictures. That was a neat event, and those images were unique to this year, especially with it being the first year of what they expect to be an annual thing. 

What can I say I will change going forward? First, as soon as I can afford to, I will be buying a second card identical to the one I have. Thankfully, my camera has two memory card slots, and they can be set up in a variety of ways, including simultaneous recording to both slots. Second, I just need to improve my process. I need to verify that the copy was done before hitting that format button. That is it, two changes to avoid this kind of heartbreak in the future.

The next step is to clean up the hard drives so I can duplicate them in case one of those fails, but that is a story for the future.

Bottom line for readers, be smart with your data, have backups and when in doubt, double check before formatting. If you do find that you deleted important data, start with Wondershare Recoverit, just make sure you do not write any data to the drive you are trying to recover.