Lexar Professional CF Cards

All of our CF cards (those are the cards that our photos are stored in until we upload them from our cameras), are Lexar Professional CompactFlash Cards.

We used to use a sort of random assortment of cards that we had acquired along the way, until one day back up in New Hampshire when Lexar really came through for us. We lost an image that we had taken on a Lexar card, and we thought we were totally out of luck. Now, I know this sounds like a strike against Lexar, but that’s only because you don’t have all the details yet.

We had lost an image file that we needed to print for one of our first and favorite clients (the image above), and we couldn’t recover it from either of our computers or back up drives. The CF cards had been formatted and reformatted several times by this point, and I was certain that all was lost. This was long after we had successfully gotten the file off the card, and it was our own fault, not the fault of Lexar. It had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since, but I still feel a little sick every time I remember it. I was in tears as I sent an e-mail to the client informing them that I couldn’t make a print of their favorite image from their engagement session.

It wasn’t until days later that I learned that Lexar had a somewhat famous recovery program called Lexar Image Rescue, which I immediately downloaded. I wasn’t even sure if the photo I wanted to recover had been taken with our Lexar card, but I just had to try. My eyes were glued to the computer screen as I watched image after image pop up from all the shoots I had taken with that card. Then I saw it. It was there, resurrected from the digital spirit world where photos go when you think they’ve been deleted. Sure I had to edit the file again, but that was a small price to pay. Sending a second e-mail to our bride-to-be felt so good that I thought I was going to cry again.

We soon replaced all of our cards with Lexar products, just because it felt good to have that kind of security - one extra layer of protection in case something else fails or we screw up. Thankfully we haven’t had to use that software again since, but it’s nice to know that it’s there.