My first 7D DISASTER
 

When I want to check the space left on a card, I've been going to menu>format, (which tells you the space used and left), and then hitting "cancel". Is there another way to check card space?

Yesterday we had a 3 camera shoot for a long variety showcase. In addition to the three video cameras, I roamed around getting a lot of nice shots with the 7D. Something happened when I checked my card space left, and 27 gigs of footage got erased. A programmer friend wants to check the card to see if he can retrieve the data, but I'm not hopefull. Has anyone else done this?

The only good news is that the guy who hired me has no idea what I shot on the 7D, and will be happy with the other 3 camera footage ( plus concert audio and inetrview s after).
But it was a long, depressing ride home.:((.
Bruce Yarock

Bruce, if you don't write anything else to the card it can be recovered. So, put it in a plexiglass box and get a data recovery software.
Bill

I recommend this:

ZAR data recovery software - do it yourself data recovery and digital image recovery.

It's worked for me on both hard drive and flash card.
And it's worked for this guy.

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/long-bla...sad-story.html

As always, YMMV.

I don't understand, you pushed delete? Or did it crash?

ohhh, i just checked on my camera to see how you did it... slip of the finger... sucks...

So good question: Is there another way to check the space left?

Can you not just hit INFO while in live view / while rolling to see how much recording time is available on the card? This is also how we keep track of how close we are to the 12 minute cut-off. You can do this on both 5D and 550D.

Yes you can do it, that's the way I work. But it can't display remaining time higher that 29:59. So when the camera say there is 29:59 left, there is more then that. When it's lower, you can rely on it.

I have used this program to successfully recover 7-D mov. files from a card that was formatted.

Card Recovery v5.3
Memory Card Recovery Software to Recover Lost Photos - CardRecovery

Another program I already had would not recover mov files, so I searched for one that would and this did the job.

Brian and Mike-
Most likely it was a slip of the finger...Hard to believe that I would have done that though

I talked to a photographer friend this morning and told him what happened ( he also has a 7d). He reminded me that when you go into " format", you can press any button on the camera to get out. You don't need to enter the " cancel" option. Someone else told me that a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot. DUH...

Bill,
I'm waiting to get together with my friend later today and see what we can do.

It was 27 gigs of hard shot video, so I hope it's still there.
Bruce Yarock

Dang Bruce! Going to format to check how much space is left is such a bad idea/habit (as Bruce figured out). I usually just look at the picture counter on the top readout and once it starts counting down from 999 on my 32GB card I know I need to start watching it. I always carry extra cards/batteries with me as well so I can swap them when needed. The info button is a good idea too.

The video is there, the question is recovering it.
As others have already said, don't use that card for shooting anything else until ALL recovery attempts have been exhausted.

The program I referenced does not modify the device it is recovering from.
It scans the device and extracts what it finds to another drive that you specify.
Doing otherwise could compound the damage. And it's one of the things I like about the program.

I got a copy of Rescue Pro with my Sandisk Extreme III cards that has been very useful when I found out I didn't download the card that I thought I did. It works with all sorts of media files.

It is terrible when things like this happen. I really hope it turns out well for you, Bruce!

My safety method to this is to never use cards over 4 gigs. If anything happens to one of the cards, I don't loose more than about 10 mins.

Not sure if this is the same way as already mentioned, but you can also use the "info" button. Cycle until you see a black screen with white and cyan lettering. The bottom bit of info is "[Possible shots] Freespace CF [###] #.## GB"

Hope this helps, and best of luck with your data retrieval, Bruce.

Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions

Disater Update....

My friend tried 4 different programs, and we finally bought the newest version of card Reader. He was able to retrieve over half of the clips with the new version. According to him, the rest would have to be done by a more tedious manual method, which I'm not sure will be worth it.

As I said before, we were paid for 3 cameras, which I have; this footage was extra, but would be real handy in making the edit more dynamic and interesting. I hope what he retireved is the " good stuff".

Onar,
Four gig cards are way too small, especially for events. Last night I shot a wedding, and it was just me and the photographer. I used my Canon H1 as the main camera, and used the 7d with both the 17-55 and 70-200 as a second cam, for close ups and beauty shots . I went thorugh 32 gigs on the 7d, and even the 8 gig card made me change too quickly.

Bruce Yarock