Still recovering

My digital recovery process has some successes and some failures. I'm still working on one of the failures.

The SD card for the drone: I was able to recover 453 deleted photos. While he's flying his drone he can take videos or pics. He does both at times. All those pics are back (or at least 453 of them, I have no idea if that is all the pics he had taken with it). The program found 160 mp4 video files and recovered them. BUT, when I try to view/play them, the files won't play. UGH! I googled it and apparently it's a common problem with recovered video files.....its sounding like I would need to purchase another program to try to restore the files. UGH again. I have an email into the tech dept who I purchased the recovery program from, to see if they can advise in any way before I try to do  more research on getting those back.

I found 849 photos from his phone on his icloud backup. But, I still cannot figure out how to get them downloaded back to my pc. I find simple instructions online, but I can't seem to figure it out. It looks like it tries to download in a zip file but then fails. Then there is something about logging into icloud and downloading through that, but then I get confused again.

Then I used a different program from this recovery website to try to recover pics and videos from his iphone. It found over 3000 photos! I thought hallelujah! That's what he took all the house build pics on. But, not any of the 3000+ pics are any of the hundreds (well, just a few) he took all during the house build. WTH? Why? Why would there be 3000 deleted pics, but none of those ones? The only thing I can come up with is because of the way he was taking them from his phone and copying them to his external hard drive (daily). He would plug his phone into his computer. Then he would CUT the pics from the phone folder and paste into the hard drive folder. I'm guessing doing that didn't leave a "deleted" file on his phone to recover.

So, while we did get lots of good pics back from his phone, we didn't get all of them, that's for sure.

Last night we also remembered he used both our iPad's to make time lapse videos. I'm trying to see what I can recover from those as I type. But, I'm guessing it's going to be the same as his phone...he CUT the videos out from the ipads, so they probably are not going to be recovered. My ipad just finished scanning. There are only like 3 very recent time lapse videos. Lots of pics I had deleted over the years....because they were duplicates or just not wanted. They weren't anything I had cared to save in the first place.

I still need to download his music purchases and youtube videos, but those aren't going anywhere, so I'm not in a big hurry and will work on those as I have time.

At this point I'd give it a 50% success rate. Basically retrieved a good amount of photos, just really nothing from the house build. Once I download back all his youtube videos, I'm going to see if opening them back up in his video editing software program will allow any of the photos to be saved again. Probably not, but I will look into it. There's a lot of photos he used in making all those videos of the house build.

We received back the dead external hard drive via FedEx today. Only they took off the metal cover (not the plastic case) that goes on it and didn't return that piece with it.

and while I'm complaining, I may as well add complaining about our new payroll processing. It's so much more work than our old payroll company! I thought maybe it's just me, being slow to learn it, but we're on our 3rd payroll now and it's such a slow process. I used to only take about an hour and be done with it. Now it takes hours (and we only have 55 employees). There's so much stuff to have to manually enter in the system. I hadn't brought it up with my boss yet, thinking it was just me being slow to learn, but she called me this morning (as she had sat in our our "training" webex to process this payroll) and asked if it seemed like this process was so much more time consuming than our old one? I said yes! Seems like so many manual things to input and then reports to run to compare and double check. Just seems like lots of room for error to be made. I don't like that.  Our hourly (6) folks have to punch in and out. Add in that they forget half the time, so I'm constantly  having to email them and add their punches. I can't imagine having a bunch of hourly employees to deal with. I have one guy who cannot remember to clock in and out for lunch. And even though he keep saying "I always take a lunch", I'm not going to make assumptions about someone's hours/pay. I finally told him today in an email that he really needs to start clocking in and out for lunch. I'm also trying to get into the habit of looking at their punches daily, so I can fix any of their missed punches.