...well, a little at least.
As does my propensity for eavesdropping on tech-related questions that do not currently apply to me, with the generally-accurate assumption that at some point I will manage to break something in a similar way and have no idea how to fix it on my own.
So, backstory: On Tuesdays I have to loiter a while on campus near the lake. The lake is home to two swans, some ducks, many geese, and various squirrels, raccoons (which is apparently a typographical error, since there is no such thing as more than one raccoon? Ah, spellcheck), chipmunks, and such small deer.
Large and small alike, they are all fed on bread by idle hikers and eager children, and so have become quite (at times unnervingly) tame. I walked up on this group yesterday and only three of them even noticed me -- the female mallard second from the right isn't turning her head to look at me, she is tucking her head under her wing and falling asleep.
Anyhow, all I have to do is sit down and it's as if I'm not there at all. So the squirrels promptly started being adorable because they obviously knew I couldn't find my camera. One was drinking from the lake, one was playing with bark chips. Finally I managed to get my camera out, on, and focused in time to take a brief video of Adorable Teenage Squirrel #3 fighting with a scary stick. It was one of the cutest things I've personally witnessed and recorded a squirrel doing, and I was eager to get back home and share it. I still had time to kill before that, though, so I went through and started deleting subpar images from my camera in case something else interesting happened that required even more video space.
One of them was so blurry, I didn't know why I hadn't deleted it immediately. I clicked the trash can icon, and the "Yes" button, and then ... I clicked back a couple pictures to where my video should have been, and it was GONE.
Noooooooo.
My camera is not very good at making it clear which preview images are images and which are video stills, and I apparently misjudged which images came before and after the video I wanted, because I had deleted it. Just like that. IT WAS BLURRY BECAUSE IT WAS A SQUIRREL MID-CUTE-ATTACK. After fretting about this (and the lack of an "undo" button) for a good thirty seconds I realized that (unlike similar disasters I'd had in the past with less-sophisticated media-recording devices) the image had been stored on a memory card, and the thing about memory cards was that deleted things weren't necessarily Gone Forever.
I rushed home (being ridiculously careful to remind myself not to take anymore pictures with the camera in the interim, just in case), jumped to the first forum post I could find asking about recovering deleted images, and LO AND BEHOLD, there were options.
I hooked up the Lumix, downloaded PhotoRec, and with a few keystrokes I had recovered my beloved squirrel (along with ten or fifteen less-beloved squirrels that had been deleted in the same run).
As the sort of person who's had more than one "NOOOO, I TAPED OVER MY FAVORITE SONG/TV SHOW/RANDOM SOUND CLIP AND NOW IT'S GONE FOREVER AND THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS FINDING IT ON THE INTERNET" moment, I have to say I don't entirely mind the "nothing you delete is ever really gone" element of today's technology.
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