Slides and negatives didn't just all evaporate at once due to the failure of a single transistor in a hard drive or a bug in an operating system...

(although they are likely to be vulnerable to rain getting into the loft )

Robin

I have been using Mozy (www.mozy.com) for online backup for about 6 months now - it's pretty good. As someone else pointed out external drives are great, but can still get stolen or toasted in a fire (even in a safe). Mozy is free to try (up to 2gb storage) and $5/month for unlimited storage.

The advantage of online backup is that it just happens automatically rather than you having to remember to actually do it.

Depending on how techy you are, you could also consider carbonite (www.carbonite.com) - it has the same $5/month charge for unlimited storage, but is less complex to set up.

Robin

Memory cards are almost always FAT/FAT32 formatted. It's a long time ago, but I seem to recall that the way something got deleted on FAT was to mark a single bit in the directory entry as deleted (leaving the bulk of the entry intact) and to free up the blocks used int the FAT itself. Providing the file was contiguous on the disk you still had the length and starting sector from the directory entry and had a good chance of recovering it. There were a whole bunch of undelete programs from the early DOS/Windows days that worked in this manner.

Even if none of the above worked, it would be possible to write a program to read all the (supposedly) unused sectors on a card looking for ones that started with a JPEG header. Once you find one, read continuous sectors until you have a valid JPEG file (hurray!) or garbage (boo!) and start looking for a jpeg header again.

To be honest, either type of tool would (I think) work fairly well on a memory card used for images - since with a small number of large files, most files will be contiguous (unfragmented). This would be particularly true if you tend to clear the card completely rather than delete files on an ad-hoc basis.

Good luck with the recovery, anyway!

Robin

I make my K10D LCD 50mm wide and 37.5mm high - that's the actual image area.

Robin

Some credit cards give you 90 days or so accidental damage insurance for purchases made on the card - worth checking out if you bought by CC.

Robin

I think it's using the flash as an auto-focus assist lamp. It's in the manual somewhere, and it doesn't happen very often.

Robin

Tricky, since like most people I have about 10 of these cords around the place, and no real idea which came with the K10D.

The one I *think* came with the camera (looks new) has a black fuse cover and is labeled Linetek LP61-L below the pins.

Robin

Buzzard, Suffolk Owl Sanctuary




K10D, FA80-320@90mm
ISO 500, 1/2000s f/8.0

Not sure I buy into the idea of 19" TFT's - it's a bit of a no-mans-land in terms of size since you typically stick with the 1280x1024 resolution of the 17". I have both sizes on my desk at work and I really don't find any significant advantage from the 19".

I replaced my 19" Iiyama Visionmaster CRT (can't recall the model number) with a 17" Philips TFT a few years back. The TFT won hands down in terms of ease on the eyes and picture quality. Don't forget that 19" CRTs have ~17" visible area..

Things to look out for are DVI sockets and the number of dead/stuck pixels for which you can return the TFT as each manufacturer has their own policy on this.

Robin

Well, I did say in my original question that I intended to delete the one star images - perhaps I should have been clearer that this was my real goal as I'm happy to use the Picasa stars for the good photos...

Anyway, I'm getting towards a solution for my trash problem - If I add the photos I don't want to a trash (or 1*) album, as suggested by Prieni, although I can't delete them straight from the album, I can then search for 'trash' and it finds all the photos in that album listed in their folder context, from which I can delete them happily.

To be honest I'm still getting my head around the idea of having albums and folders that are independent from each other and what the possibilities of that are.

thanks,

Robin