Lessons learned... computer crashes and lost images

I'd love to be sharing one of my photos from Florida or my trip to the snow in the NC Mountains with you here.. but there is one problem.

My laptop crashed this last weekend.

My normal work process has been to download the RAW files from my CF card onto the laptop, go through them to delete out and edit the shots, then move the remaining photos over to the External Drive.



Once I put the shots on the laptop, I'm in the habit of reformatting my CF card in the camera to be ready for the next trip...

All was fine until the laptop crashed (thanks to a Windows Vista SP update I think) in that time after reformatting the CF card and moving the files to my external drive.

I'm "hoping" that since it appears to be a software issue, I might be able to dismount the hard drive and pull the files off of it... Note the word hope.

Lessons Learned:

Immediately save the files onto the External Drive (then edit from there).
Leave the files on the CF card until I'm ready to shoot again
Make an extra copy of the edited shots onto a DVD...

Hope this helps someone else

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