Hi hoping someone might be able to help - we were on holiday for 11 days in the States, we were in New York and DC and took about 2000 photos in all. However, on the 4th day of the trip we got a bus in the morning from NYC to DC and the last photos we took that day were in NYC whilst waiting for the bus, the photo number/stamp for that photo is 1163. The following day we went around DC and took about 500 hundred photos, that evening whilst taking some more we went to look back on a few and all of a sudden we were back to the last photo in NYC (1163), and the most recent photo we had was 1577 from just a few minutes previously in DC that night. We've put the SD card into the PC and can only see the photos that appear when it's in the camera, I ran a recovery software and whilst it found some deleted photos these were just individual photos we would have deleted at different points, none of which fall within the stamp of 1164 - 1576. (Also, we did continue to use the camera after this.) We have the camera since Christmas, have used it plenty since then, there is loads of storage/memory on the card and are really just perplexed as to how photos from just one day disappeared, no other photos since we first started using the camera were affected, just this one particular day. If it might be at all possible to recover the photos any ideas would be greatly appreciated!! Finally, if there's no chance we can get them back we don't mind so long as we can find out what happened so that we can try ensure it doesn't happen again. We're gutted as we had gotten some great shots that day! Any help/advice would be much appreciated, and apologies for the long message, trying to give as much detail as possible!
Only recovery software can help you. It's essential to use good recovery software which can recover overwritten files. Compare these and try to see if these can recover those or not. https://www.guru99.com/free-photo-recovery-software.html
It is true that a good recovery program would recover files even if overwritten, so you may want to research what you used against some of the other programs available. My thoughts on your larger concern about the underlying problem. You may have a card that is starting to go bad on certain sectors. And they corrupted while you were traveling on vacation. It seems rather crazy coincidence, but the count increasing either means the mages were recorded or the camera thought it was writing to the card, it can oly be the card or the camera if you think about it. I would keep an eye on the card, that is more likely than the camera writing ghost images. You should aim to have more than one memory card of your camera because you never know when it may fail and also it gives you room to shoot and swap if you reach the capacity. Any storage solution can last a decade or last only 3 months, its better to spread the risk across multiple cards /hard drives /etc.... Buying two card of medium size storage actually can be cheaper than one of the larger size sometimes. For example right now I have 16 32 and 64 gig CF cards nothing larger than that, it easily covers a day of shooting for me and I transfer and format the card in camera after every shoot.
Good tips from Johnsey above, another important one is "do not delete single shots in the camera", leave everything on the card then once you have downloaded them all to the PC put your card back in the camera just format it to give you a fresh start. Many people have found that deleting shots in camera can cause card problems.
