My digital camera is in my company nearly constantly, and even though it's a craggy and increasingly recalcitrant 2.1-megapixel Epson 850z, I still appreciate it. Until I cobble together the $900 or so I need for a Canon Digital Rebel EOS, the 850z is my only everyday camera. In the past, I've written about my fears of losing the digital photos I've taken because of a calamitous, hard-drive-corrupting computer crash. What I didn't realize is that there is a more immediate way to lose your digital memories.

Allow me to recount my tale of lost and found. In it you may find some useful tips for rescuing your memories from the jaws of the abyss.

The 850z came with a 8MB Compact Flash card, and even though it is just a 2.1MP camera, photos taken at the highest resolution can eat up as much as a half a megabyte, meaning I get roughly 16 shots on the card. I eventually upgraded to a 64MB card that allows me to take about 90 shots before having to empty it. For much of the last few years, I used the included USB cable and proprietary Epson software to download the digital photos onto my PC. The USB 1.1 connection was pretty slow, so downloading 40 or 50 shots could take 15 minutes or more. Then I got a SanDisk Ultra ImageMate Card Reader ($30 street) that hooks up to my Sony VAIO's FireWire port. Now I no longer need the Epson software. The card reader allows my PC to see the card as an external, removable flash drive, and the IEEE-1394 speed means I can transfer 90 photos in under a minute.

All this encouraged me to take even more photos with the camera and try to capture big and small moments with my kids. The other day, for example, my 6-year-old daughter insisted we rake our small leaf collection into a pile so she could jump into it. I agreed, and we set to work on a brilliant and blustery fall day collecting our somewhat puny leaf pile. When we were done I told her to wait to jump until I got my camera. I brought back the camera and got set as she took a flying leap into the pile. We raked it back together, and then my 9-year-old son jumped in. I took eight pictures of them jumping and lying in the leaves alone and together. Then I previewed the shots on the camera's LCD. I was thrilled. I had captured both of my children in mid-flight over the leaves. I showed the shots to my wife and, as is often the case, since I had only taken eight shots, I put the camera aside, figuring I'd take more and then download the images.

A day or so later, I thought about the images again and decided I wanted to see them enlarged on my PC screen. I popped out the SanDisk Compact Flash card and brought it down to the PC in my basement. I stuck it in the flash-card reader and waited. Normally the card prompts an autorun and Microsoft Windows XP asks me, among other choices, if I want to view a slide show or the contents of the disk. This time, nothing happened. I pulled out the card and put it back in. Again, nothing. I opened the My Computer icon on the PC and then selected Drive E, the drive letter for the flash disk. It opened the disk and in it was a DCIM folder. I selected that, expecting to see my eight JPG image files. Instead, it was empty.

I closed the directory and drive listing on the PC, took out the card and brought it back upstairs. I then put it back in the camera. I turned on the camera. There's an LCD on top of the camera that, along with shot settings, tells me how many photos I can still take. When the card is empty, it says 90. In this case, it said 82. But when I switched the camera to "Play" to try to view the shots on the card on the LCD, the camera reported that there were no images to view.

I know that these were just photos and that I can always get another shot of my kids in the leaves, but I really felt like I had caught a moment and hated the idea of losing the images.

 I took the card out of the camera again and put it back in the card reader. Then I went online and began searching for information about CF image recovery. To my surprise, there were dozens of articles on the subject, and related ones about data corruption on the cards. I felt comforted that, perhaps, I was not alone in this. I saw some notes about utilities for CF recovery and wended my way from site to site and through various cross-links. Apparently, CF image recovery is something of a cottage industry. There are numerous pay and freeware solutions. I found this one for Zero Assumption Recovery or ZAR. It's a freely available 600KB downloadable utility.

There isn't much to ZAR. It has a simple interface that, upon launch, lists your available drives, including the flash drive. It doesn't note that it's a flash drive, but I could tell that it was by the size (just 55MB). All I had to do was set a directory where I wanted recovered files to be dumped and then select the drive where I wanted to attempt image recovery. I selected the E drive and watched as ZAR reported recovering over 60 files. I wasn't sure if that was good news or bad, since I was only looking for eight images.

When ZAR had completed its work, I navigated to the directory where the "recovered" files were stored. There were images I had previously deleted from the drive and, at the very end of the list, the eight images I had lost. I was, of course, thrilled.

Most of the sites that discussed CF data corruption recommended reformatting the drive (whether or not you could recover the missing data). This task, I found, has to be performed in the camera. I removed the card from the reader, placed it back in the camera, selected Media Format and then reformatted the CF card. It took about a half a second.

I'm not certain of how a portion of the card got corrupted, especially since all of the images I shot were complete and retrievable. Still, the camera is so old that it takes 15 seconds to refresh on the highest resolution. If the camera were accidentally turned off during this process, there could have been some data corruption. I may never know, but I have learned to be more careful and that, when all else fails, there are free and effective measures for recovering my precious photographic data.