December 31, 2010. The stroke of midnight.

It’s been a 16-hour shoot, and I’ve just called for wrap. Everyone’s spirits, dampened by six hours of overrun spent shooting products against greenscreen in the studio, are now palpably higher. Bottles of beer, already having mysteriously appeared on the set in the past hour, are passed around as the hot film lights are struck off. It’s been three days of filming, and now that New Year’s Eve is a mere 12 hours away, everyone’s relaxed and upbeat, talking about their plans for the weekend. The grip is grinning from ear to ear. But of course he is; in a few hours’ time, he’ll be on a plane to Phuket.

At the loading/unloading bay we part. There’s no one else around. Home being a mere six stops away, I decide to catch the last bus. Walking in the light drizzle, I clutch the tote bag closer to me. Even in my slightly-buzzed state, I am mindful of its contents: a laptop, a hard disk and numerous memory cards containing three days’ worth of footage. Losing any one of them, at a cost of thousands of dollars per shoot day, would be instant career suicide.

On this shoot, I am also the data wrangler, the guy whose job is to ensure footage is safely transferred from the cameras and filed onto disk. Normally, the footage is transferred immediately once the memory card is filled and ejected from the camera. But it has been a long day. It’s understandable.

In the morning I wake and set about transferring the last of the footage, about 20 gigabytes, on two cards. 16 GBs down, I plug in the second one, a SanDisk Extreme IV 8 GB CompactFlash card, only to see its volume icon appear on the Mac OS X desktop briefly before disappearing just as quickly. My heart skips a beat, because I know exactly what’s going to happen next.

An error box pops up, right on cue: “The disk you inserted was not recognized by this computer. Initialize, ignore, or eject?”

Fuck. My balls hit the floor and roll off under the desk.

For some reason, the volume on the card has not been unmounted cleanly. Maybe it’s a loose USB cable connection. Maybe it’s failing hardware. Who can say for sure? But what I know for sure is this:

A memory card—any storage medium—needs a filesystem in order to have files written onto it. But, before that, a partition has to exist before a filesystem can be created to store files and subsequently accessed by a camera or a computer.

It’s common knowledge that you have to eject or unmount a memory card before you can pull it out of a card reader. When a card is not safely unmounted, when the operating system hasn’t had enough time to cleanly write to the card, resulting in a “dirty write,” it almost always corrupts the filesystem, rendering it in a unreadable state.

But the data is still in there. It’s just that the partition cannot be seen because it is now corrupted; quite simply, the operating system, a visitor in the middle of a street, cannot find the house that is the partition because its address plate is missing. The house and its occupants—the data, your precious data—is still there, plain as day.

Being no stranger to data loss, my instincts kick in, and I click the “Eject” button. Now, if you ever find yourself staring at this very error dialog box, never, NEVER EVER click “Initialize.” If you do, the operating system will format the card, which will stack the odds against you of successfully recovering your data.

I curse in six languages and begin the recovery process with a few recovery applications: Data Rescue II, Drive Genius, SanDisk Recovery Pro. The usual suspects. None works.

The problem is, most recovery applications are designed to recover data that has been accidentally overwritten or deleted from a card, and are clueless when it comes to a card with a corrupted filesystem. If the operating system cannot mount the card and make it available to the user, the user cannot tell the recovery application to recover the card.

Classic LPPL*.

Eight hours go by. Here I am, on New Year’s Eve, faced with the possible loss of four hours’ of footage shot on overtime costs. I do the math and wonder if it’s cheaper to reshoot or to send for data recovery, the cost of which I’m sure will be exorbitant.

Even as I’m ready to throw the towel in, and mentally bracing myself for the inevitable, the geek in me refuses to concede, because I KNOW the damned data is still in there intact. I give Google one last search. One particular listing in the search results reads like my personal 12-step program to data salvation.

TestDisk. Fixes, repairs or rebuilds FAT16, FAT32, HFS+ and NTFS partitions. Runs on DOS, Windows 9x, XP, NT, Vista, FreeBSD, Linux and Mac OS X. Open source software. Free.

I download and fire TestDisk up. It’s old-skool command-line based; Arrow up/down, Enter, “Y”/”N” keys, that sort of thing.

I pop in the corrupted card. It doesn’t mount, of course, but this shows up in TestDisk:

Disk /dev/rdisk0 - 7.6 GB / 7.0756 GiB

It’s The Partition Formerly Known As KNN**.

I give the instructions TestDisk advises a good once-over, select the partition and hit “Repair.”

It must have taken, by my unscientific guesstimate, only all of 15.383 seconds before the beloved “EOS_DIGITAL” volume icon pops up on the OS X desktop. My jaw drops correspondingly as fast.

You’ve never seen me do a CMD+A, CMD+C and CMD+V faster in my life. As I lean back into my chair and exhale, I become aware of the commotion in the living room. Something’s happening on TV.

Oh yeah, Happy New Fucking Year.

_{* For my non-Chinese friends, LPPL is loosely and politely translated as a Catch-22, a no-win situation. The actual translation has got something to do with testicles…
** … while KNN has something to do with one’s mother.}