When my hard drive mechanically failed last year, it was impossible to recover any of the data from it. Fortunately most of it was backed up on my laptop, on my iPod, or on CDs. The big casualty, however, was an album of photos taken at Sammi’s Halloween party (the night before I left for New York).

Last week when my new hard drive failed (non-mechanically), I purchased some file recovery software so that I could copy all of the data off the drive. Now, this software still wouldn’t be able to do anything for the mechanically failed drive, but it sparked an idea.

I decided to run the file recovery software on my digital camera’s memory card. Lo and behold, it was able to “un-delete” several of the photos from Sammi’s Halloween party, and I was a happy camper.