re: #51 Sleepyone

I took so many digital photographs of lower Manhattan and midtown in the days following 9/11 (I lived on the Lower East Side at the time) and unfortunately my daughter accidentally erased my external hard drive (where the photos were stored) and they are lost. I had tons of photos of the event itself, the aftermath, walking around the neighborhood seeing crying people on the street. Photos of a completely empty lower Broadway and West Broadway below Houston. Photos of the hundreds of missing flyers that were plastered everywhere and images of memorials laid at the door of multiple firehouses. All lost.

I did keep the external hard drive and never used it again in the event I can find some place to retrieve the data. I tried everything I could think of on my own but couldn’t access it.

Unless it was securely erased, there are places that can recover quite a bit, if not all, but we’re talking a lot of money.
If it was just the directory info, it is easier, but pictures are hard to recover, because there is no easy way to tell which file block goes with which picture and where.