Disappearing Files?

[C1ndyluhu]

 

Okay, here's the deal...I had a CD with my Christmas pictures from 2006 on it. The pix took up approximately 196 MB of space, so after Christmas 2007, I burned a session to add the new pix to the disk. The disk verified and I labeled it with the new additions, and I'm pretty sure I've opened it and looked at the pictures a time or two since then...

 

And then Thursday, when I popped the disk in, the second session (Christmass 2007) never showed up on the desktop. So I looked at it with Disk Utility, and it shows that the disk size is around 600 MB, and that one partition (Christmas 2006) is 196 MB, but the other partition doesn't have a name or anything....

 

So what happened to my pix, and how do I recover them (they are not backed up elsewhere)?

[tsantee]

If you burned this CD using Mac & PC format then insert the disc in a PC to see if you can view all the photos. Otherwise you may need to send the disc to a company that does data recovery.

 

I've read a few posts over the past several years similar to yours. It seems that burning additional sessions to a CD-R using a different computer, a different OS version, a different optical drive or different Toast versions or settings (such as Mac only on one session and Mac & PC on another session) may cause problems with the disc's directory. I'm only telling you what I've speculated; I don't have research to back up that speculation. In any case, I don't recommend burning critical information as sessions especially now that small USB flash drives are cheap. Back up incrementally to a flash drive and when it is filled to a size that fits a CD burn the CD in Write Disc mode. With photos its a good idea to burn two copies and to two different brands of CD media in case one of the discs proves defective at some future time.

 

[C1ndyluhu]

Thanks again. This is all excellent advice. I do have two burners on this computer, one internal, the other Firewire. So it's highly likely that I burned the CD using different burners for each session without even thinking about it. And although I tried to put the disk in another computer, I didn't try putting it in my other drive (DOH!). Unfortunately, it's not reading it there either.

 

Would the "Disk Recovery" feature of Toast be able to fix it? Or what about trying to burn another session onto the disk and "closing" the disk? Would either of them do any harm to the disk? I don't want to screw up the only copies of the pix in trying....

 

 

[tsantee]

Thanks again. This is all excellent advice. I do have two burners on this computer, one internal, the other Firewire. So it's highly likely that I burned the CD using different burners for each session without even thinking about it. And although I tried to put the disk in another computer, I didn't try putting it in my other drive (DOH!). Unfortunately, it's not reading it there either.

 

Would the "Disk Recovery" feature of Toast be able to fix it? Or what about trying to burn another session onto the disk and "closing" the disk? Would either of them do any harm to the disk? I don't want to screw up the only copies of the pix in trying....

If the sessions were burned as Mac & PC format do try it in a PC rather than a Mac. The PC formatting for sessions is different and it may be readable there.

 

I don't know of any way to access files on a CD for content that won't mount. I've tried various things. I'm skeptical Toast's disc recovery will access these files but you may as well give it a go. There are some photo recovery applications but those are for damaged files on discs or memory cards that are mounted. There are several services such as Drive Savers that can recover data from all kinds of unmountable media. So your photos can be reclaimed for a fee. It is unlikely that anything more you do with the disc will make an earlier session mountable, though.

 

I'm trying to think of where you can get more experienced advice than what I know. You might search MacFixit.com.