When memory cards first came out, their capacity was measured in megabytes – and not very many of them! Today, they are 4 Gig or even larger, capable of storing 600 to 1000 high-res, high-quality images.

Keen photographers then have vast files needing uploading to a computer hard drive. From there, the photographs are normally transferred to CDs or DVDs for archiving.

But many images are retained on the hard drive for enhancement and start taking up bulk space – so soon another drive is required. Unless you install another hard drive in your system, the usual choice is a USB drive, which as its name suggests, simply plugs into a vacant USB port. The computer detects the new drive and assigns an ID to it.

Normally this is pretty painless but sometimes results in confusion for the disk and computer, especially (for example) if you also use other removable drives and are forever plugging and unplugging them. In a rush, the drive can be unplugged before all the data is written.

At minimum, the data can become corrupted. Worse, hard drive failure (crash) may result, with all data lost – and I speak from sad experience. When this happens, you can try various data recovery methods; you can accept the losses or if the images are worth it, involve a specialist recovery company at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000.

In most cases, the drive itself is a write-off. Even though you may get it to work, our experience is that once a drive has crashed, it’s likely to do it again. It may just lie there doggo, waiting until you have particularly important images stored on it . . .

Until you or your computer dealer has tried all conventional restoration methods, like repair software, don’t assume all the data is lost.

Disk recovery businesses try their powerful repair software too, and if that fails, the hard disk platter may be physically removed, then installed in a good drive in a totally dust-free environment. A new directory and device driver must be written onto the corrupted disk, so some data can be lost but most times most data is recovered. Needless to say, this is not a cheap process!