Data recovery at home

 J was looking through some documents to do with her mother's death  that she had got some years ago from her sister, deciding what needed to be kept and what didn't. In among the papers was a CD labelled Graham family photos.

We had been living in England when J's mother died, (this had been round about the turn of the millennium) and it had been left to her sister to get rid of her mother's effects, and it looked like  an album of family photos had disappeared.

So, did the CD have the missing photos?

Well, J's sister's husband been a photographer with The Age in Melbourne, and later on a TAFE photography lecturer, as well as being someone who was both interested in the history of photography - he built himself a copy of a nineteenth century glass plate camera at one point -  and had dabbled a bit in family history, so it was just possible he had copied them, perhaps for a project of his own.

Unfortunately we couldn't ask him exactly what had happened as he died a few years ago.

And of course computers don't have CD drives these days.

So, nothing ventured, nothing gained, I bought a $20 external usb cd drive from ebay and connected it up to an old Windows 10 laptop.

Nothing doing.

The drive just went didididuh and refused to read the CD.

I tried the drive hooked up to a linux machine with the same result.

Either the drive was damaged, or the CD was.

Not having any spare data CD's to hand I couldn't check if the drive worked.

And then, fortunately,  I remembered that the scruffy old linux machine in the outside studio actually  did have a cd drive, and what's more the heating had been on so the machine was not cold (CD drives don't work if they are too cold - tolerances - and don't like condensation if the air is damp),

So I stuck the CD in and hey presto! this time I could read it.

The files turned out to be in .bmp format, but the pictures were all there, so I uploaded the files from the CD to OneDrive and shared them with J.

Job done, and I might even have convinced J that these old machines running Linux might even be useful...