Photo mess please help

[Chisi]

Hi I'm new here and I'm in my 70s so not too tech savvy but I do know my way around a PC to a certain extent.
Sorry if this is long winded but I dont know any other way to explain my problem so please be patient.

I've been downloading photos for years, keeping them in separate files on my PC but realised I'm running out of space. I started putting them onto DVDs. I bought Verbatum DVD - R and covers to put them in. When I'd done a few I realised I should to print out covers for each DVD to make it easier to identify. So I went back to choose a photo from each DVD for the covers to find there was NOTHING on the DVD. I was absolutely distraught!
I then went into an app called RECOVA and was able to recover some but not all. The ones I cant get have turned out to be a mountain scene in blue, they wont open, there are so many. So many irreplaceable photos.
Can anyone help please, much appreciated.

 

[Grizzly]

did you finalize your dvd's after burning and did you already delete the originals??

There may have been some errors happened while burning,however the burning program should have noticed that and give you a warning message. However restoring those files could be tricky and sometimes even expensive if done by professionals.

May I make a suggestion?? Instead of moving your pictures onto a dvd, use an external hard drive instead. Burned DVD's become unreadable over time cause the layers are deteriorating which does not happen with an external Hard drive. A good 2 TB (terabyte - roughly 200+ DVD's ) are available for under $100.00 . 1TB drives are already less than $50. Get a good one like Western Digital or better two, so you have another backup in case a drive fails. Has worked for me so far...

 

[BigFeet]

I agree with Grizzly. An external hard drive is the best way to go. I've found dvd's to be a bit unreliable.

 

[Chisi]

Hi I'm new here and I'm in my 70s so not too tech savvy but I do know my way around a PC to a certain extent.
Sorry if this is long winded but I dont know any other way to explain my problem so please be patient.

I've been downloading photos for years, keeping them in separate files on my PC but realised I'm running out of space. I started putting them onto DVDs. I bought Verbatum DVD - R and covers to put them in. When I'd done a few I realised I should to print out covers for each DVD to make it easier to identify. So I went back to choose a photo from each DVD for the covers to find there was NOTHING on the DVD. I was absolutely distraught!
I then went into an app called RECOVA and was able to recover some but not all. The ones I cant get have turned out to be a mountain scene in blue, they wont open, there are so many. So many irreplaceable photos.
Can anyone help please, much appreciated.

 

[Chisi]

Ho Grizzly and big feet (love your names)
Not sure if this is the place to answer you so hope you get it.
Thank you so much for your reply. It's been very helpful for doing future downloads of my photos but in the meantime is there nothing I can do to be able to open these that have changed to be unreadable?
I don't know re your question. I just dragged and dropped and they seemed OK at the time. I checked by ejecting and re loading before YES deleting from my pc. That's why I went to Recuva and was able to retrieve some.
Many many thanks for your help.

 

[bassfisher6522]

Ho Grizzly and big feet (love your names)
Not sure if this is the place to answer you so hope you get it.
Thank you so much for your reply. It's been very helpful for doing future downloads of my photos but in the meantime is there nothing I can do to be able to open these that have changed to be unreadable?
I don't know re your question. I just dragged and dropped and they seemed OK at the time. I checked by ejecting and re loading before YES deleting from my pc. That's why I went to Recuva and was able to retrieve some.
Many many thanks for your help.

Realistically, no.....but there are a few options. These are professional Data recover companies that work for State/Federal agency's. They are expensive and there are no guarantees.

That said.....along with my colleagues excellent advice; I would also recommend a cloud service as a backup in conjunction with a portable HDD and on your PC. I use Google's "Backup and Sync" on my pc. So every picture I save to my computer no only stays on my PC but goes to "Backup and Sync" which you can access Googles Chrome browser by singing in with your Google account info then select Google photos. This way I have 3 copies

 

[BigFeet]

The one thing you may want to try, and it's a long shot. But try the dvd's in another computer if you have one available (a friends or family member). It may be able to read the dvd better.

And like bassfisher said, it's a good idea to use cloud storage along with backing up to an external hard drive. Google drive gives you 7 gb of storage I believe, and if you have a gmail account it's already available. Same with onedrive if you have a microsoft account. I keep my important files in multiple places. I too lost many older pictures when I accidentally formatted my hard drive (a long story).

 

[TechnoChicken2006]

Professional data recovery could be $1000-$2000