I was working on an important show, a year or more of work, juggling that with too many other things going on as well. I was also juggling with space on my hard drives, so I had gotten into the bad habit of storing all my photographs files--and they are large ones, 5 gig or more par photograph counting all the versions from initial scan to final edited version--on a partition of an external drive which I had purchased to back up my Imac G5, and had another partition, just for the back up, but that partition was rather small by comparison to the size of the drive, leaving quite a bit of space opened to my appetite for GB.

One night, way too late at night, I finally got around t do my first back up of the Imac, using Retrospect, which the back up software that the drive came with. I don't like Retrospect, never have, these guys have managed to make something that should be simple, quite mind puzzling. You, at least I, are never too sure with Retrospect. Well, sure enough, although I thought that my instructions to the software, I thought, were pretty clear, I don't know how, it managed to confuse me, and wanted to know one too many time where I wanted to back up. It was late, I certainly was not in good thinking shape, and since Retrospect wanted to erase (which is normal) the partition where the back up was going to go, guess what, it ended up that the erased partition was the one with all my photographs files. And yes, for most of them, these were the only files I had.

If you read this and are in a similar situation, you know now that you are not the only person on earth who has ever found itself in such a fix. But of course I might be the only guy who was ever incautious enough to arrive there. At any rate, since the erasing had literally taken 1 and a half second, I intuitively knew that the files were most likely still there. I inquired and was directed to D.R.II. I found it extremely easy to use, very straight forward, and it saved my year, as I had quite a few man hours invested in those files. A few older files were not recovered in a usable fashion, but they might have been corrupted before, and at any rate where not of any significance. This actually gave me an occasion to purge some old stuff that was of questionable interest.

Jean-Christian Rostagni, Photographe sur la ligne de front