On a recent assignment I lost all my images from the last 1/3rd of the day, seemingly out of nowhere. I had been tethering all day to my laptop, occasionally backing up to a G-Technology HD, but on the last look of the day disaster struck.
I was on the 3rd and final location, shooting with an external monitor hooked up to my laptop, and saw the images come through, occasionally stopping the shoot to mark selects with the art director. My team and I visually saw the CR2 files come into Capture One, but after we wrapped, and we went to back up the last hour, the raw files were gone. The proxies and thumbnails under the Capture One 'capture' folder were still there, however, the actual RAW files were nowhere to be found (I've taken the laptop to 2 data recovery specialists, and the Apple Store; nothing has been recovered). The computer trash folder had not been emptied, and still had files deleted from a. few days prior. The peculiar thing was that the first 3 images shot were in the Capture Folder, and the last 3 images shot were in the trash folder. Also, it's worth nothing that during the reshoot a few days later, I noticed the RAW files were occasionally coming in grey in the MAC finder window.
I can't for the life of me figure out what happened. I can't imagine that someone on set, who had no knowledge of Capture One, could manage to delete all but the first and last 3 images, go into the Capture One Trash folder, empty that, and leave no trace. Wouldn't the proxies and thumbnails be removed as well? Wouldn't the files show up in the system trash?
I've spoken to various digital tech's, Apple, Phase One, Data Recovery Specialists... and the consensus has ranged from: someone must have hit the delete key and held it, the SSD drive was faulty, they were stuck in the cable (that was an interesting one), they must have been on the card (they were not), ghosts.
I now use ChronoSync with automatic backup as soon as changes happen within the Capture Folder, have redundant backups, and Apple has replaced the computer with the 2017 model, but I am still at a loss of what could have possibly happened. It's been a very stressful experience, especially with the cost of the reshoot, loss of confidence in my equipment, and overall feeling that I took every 'reasonable' step to prevent such a situation in the first place (I now shoot to 2 externals, and backup the selects to a cloud). Anyone have any experience with this?
Equipment used:
2016 15" MacBook Pro w/TB
Canon 5Ds
Tether Tools Cable
G-Drive External for backups.
