Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

My daughters got back last week from a trip they went on together. In the evening, on the last day of the trip, one of my daughters was looking at the 500 or so pictures she had taken during the trip and … “Memory card error”. Panic set in. I tried to reassure her over the phone that we could still probably be able to get the pictures back.

She got home the next day and I immediately worked with her to see what we could do to get the pictures back. We plugged the 2 GB SD Card into a USB card reader and … Vista couldn’t recognize the card. Windows Explorer froze when trying to identify the drive and only unfroze when the card was removed. We tried a number of utilities, including zar, disc doctor, and photorec. The best they could do was recognize that a 2 GB disk existed, but none of them could do anything with it. We also tried a USB image tool to try to copy it, but that could not get anywhere because of the freezing problem.

Researching on the Internet, I found out that memory cards have a controller on them, and if that fails, then a computer cannot recognize the card. That does not mean the data itself is missing so we still had hope.

There was no way I could do the next step, so I had to call on the “professionals”. We searched for “sd error recovery canada” on Google and that led us to ReStoring Data, a Vancouver company. I filled out their Free Quote Form and got a response by email within the hour. My eyes opened wide as I read that it would be $250 if the failure is logical, and $400 to $600 if the failure is physical. But there would be no charge if they cannot retrieve the pictures.

Now lets put this in perspective and find out how much memories are worth.

Coming back from a trip that cost several thousand dollars and were full of wonderful memories, only to horrifyingly lose a chunk of them on the last day, will not be something you’ll want to have weighing you down for the rest of your life. Paying even $600 to retrieve them – what is that the equivalent of – One airline flight? Three days hotel? A new computer you’d have to buy if yours blew up? Fifteen years ago, it would cost $10 for the film cost and development of a roll of 24 pictures. For 500 pictures, that would have cost over $200 then that we now get for free with digital cameras. No, even $600 is not too much to pay to regain these memories.

Of course these companies got you. They know how valuable your memories are and they make you pay for them – sigh. But I don’t discredit them for that. They provide a service that right now we deeply want. I’m just glad they don’t want $2,000, or $20,000.

Today I dropped the SD card off at their pick up location in Winnipeg. The “forensic” experts in Vancouver will look at it next week and we’ll get the diagnosis. We’ve got our fingers crossed for good luck.

This version includes several changes and fixes, especially to ensure the proper input of large (> 32MB) GEDCOM files. For a complete list of changes this release, see the Behold History page.

Next on tap will be getting those darned recursive links finally implemented properly. I’ve finally figured out exactly how to do it, and it should only take a few days. Then theres a few niggly bugs to fix and then some of the last user interface improvements. That will be followed by a complete run-through of all my test GEDCOM files to make sure that Behold displays each file correctly. Then the Help file gets updated. Then Version 1 release. I’m excited.

A new version is out. Lots of fixes and small but necessary improvements that won’t be easy to find unless you know where to look. But somehow everything will feel a little smoother and the report be better. Go to the Behold History page for a complete listing of the changes.

This beta took a couple of weeks longer than expected. I got stuck at the end trying to implement the recursive links (links more than 1 level deep). Few GEDCOMs have these but it will be very important for Behold in the future. So I decided to release this beta with only level 1 links working and I’ll work to complete this first for the next beta.

There’s about 15 things left on the beta ToDo list. Last beta there were about 20. I did about 10 from the list, found 20 more to do, did 15 of them, and added 5 back onto the list. Thus I went from 20 down to 15. Well, at least that’s progress. I am getting closer.

Enjoy this version. There were a lot of internal changes this time. If you find anything not working that was before, please let me know and I’ll fix it ASAP. Same goes for anything else you find. Thanks for your help.