Data lost, data found

 So, with everything being done on computers these days, I feel it's relevent to blog about an issue that will most likely affect everyone who uses a computer to edit video...DATA LOSS!  Every good professor will tell you that when you have a project you need to make copies and copies and more copies to prevent losing footage from shoots. This is excellent advice, but murphy's law tends to strike when the chances are low and the stakes are high! What if the computer you were using to edit on suddenly won't start up correctly on the exact same day that the flash card you had video on showed up blank, and all your files were deleted? 
Don't freak out! There are many ways to recover your data!

Here are some helpful things to keep in mind about computers:

• Your hard drive files are not entirely controlled by your operating system. This means that if your operating system fails you can usually still get access to your files by using a different operating system! Your computer will still need a new OS install, but your actual files are seperate and still fully intact. 
• Hard drives and flash media are designed to write ALL of the original storage blocks before overwriting. This means that even if you delete something accidentally from a computer hard drive or flash drive/sd card, it remains on the drive until more data has been written to the drive than the size the drive is. An example: if you have a 16Gb sd card and have only ever written 10Gb of data on it, the physical drive actually still has the 10Gb on it even if it is deleted, until you overwrite more than 16Gb.

I'm sure this sounds complicated and/or boring so you don't have to remember exactly how it works, just remember that technology is robust!! And everything ALWAYS goes wrong at the worst possible time, so don't lose hope until the situation is truly f.u.b.a.r.!