Disapearing trail cam pics?

[Huntn coues]

While hanging with my family and Gino and his wife Tina this weekend we all took a ride to check on one of my cams.

Well when we get there I see the batts are dead (no surprise) and I pull out my sd card put it in a viewer and my phone

and guess what NO pics. ZERO, NOTHING.

 

I know for a fact when C/S and I set that cam we had 2 pics on it when we left. We alway's have our cams take at least two pics before we leave the area. Now how can the 2 pics be erased from my sd card the cam was cabled and locked with no signs of tampering. We did notice that there was some fence repair done in front of my cam (bout 20yrds from the cam and the cam was in plain view)

 

I guess the question is could somebody have used a magnet or something to wave in front of my cam and erase my

sd card???

 

BTW. when I got back to Bino's I replaced the batts and put in the the same sd card and it worked perfect. I also pulled the

card out to see if the cam would take the pics with the built in memory of the cam and it did so that rules out that the card was not installed properly.

 

Any Ideas guy's

[dds]

What kind of camera are you using? My Cuddeback will automatically format the card (compact flash) if it needs it. This would erase everything.

[azshtr]

It could be that the directory got messed up and the pics are still there. But if you formatted it would have messed up the chance of recovery. A picture gets taken and recorded on disc, but when you open the disc what you see is the directory as to where things are put. If the directory gets messed up it looks as if nothing is on the disc. In reality you can use a recovery program to "see" what is on the disc. You still could if you reformatted but some of the data is probably overwritten.

[CouesWhitetail]

I have had SD cards show no pics on them when I know there are pics. I find it's usually just that whatever you are using to read the card isn't reading it properly. For me, I had put it in the slot in my computer and it just wasn't registering the card. I had to keep reinserting the card and eventually the computer recognized it. So perhaps it just wasn't seated right in your reader?

 

Amanda

[Huntn coues]

It is the wildview- I think the 2.1 its the 69.00 one.

 

azshtr

 

How do I recover these pics?? I am not computer savy.

 

Amanda-

 

We were using the leafriver viewer and also my TREO cell phone. I tryed it a couple of times in each.

[300WBYMAG]

It might be something a little more devious then that. Someone might have found your cam and decided to take the pics but had some sort of conscience and didn't mess up your camera. I was checking one of my cameras this weekend and I come up on it to find the battey laying on the ground and when I opened the camera my SD card was missing. Pretty frustrating! I always have my laptop in my pack when I am checking my cams and it would be easy to just take the pics and delete them from the card.

 

Then my buddy and I were checking some of his cams and one of them had 2 pictures on it and the same situation as you where they checked before they left and the 2 pics were from us walking up to the camera, but the batteries were drained enough that there should have been a lot of pictures on there. This is the same camera that someone found and messed with by taking pictures of the sky, his hand, and then he put it right back.

 

You hate to think the worst, but I know it is happening out there.

[azshtr]

To recover any lost images use something like this

 

http://www.adrc.net/data_recovery_software/index.html

 

Don't do anything else with the disc or you will be overwriting the old data with new data. The recovery software ignores any directory and looks at the disc data and shows you all files on the disc.

[AZcoues_addict]

Sometimes if you insert the card into a cell phone or another type of camera it will reformat it, as stated. It happened to me with one of my game cams, where I used another camera to try and view the images but they were unnoticeable. That's my guess.

[azshtr]

Sometimes if you insert the card into a cell phone or another type of camera it will reformat it, as stated. It happened to me with one of my game cams, where I used another camera to try and view the images but they were unnoticeable. That's my guess.

 

Yes but remember just because its been "reformatted" all that really took place was the directory was wiped out. The data is still there till it gets overwritten by new data. Thats why you should never dump, sell, give away a computer or hard drive without first doing a secure reformat / wipe of all data. The secure wipe puts random data on the entire disc eliminating any chance of getting information. (actually even then the serious hacker types can get some data.)