Reformat needs a double confirmation message!!!

[JayJayR]

We bought a new Rebel T6i. My parents took it on a vacation, but my dad change the languge to chinese, which i do not know how to read and then i accidentally delete all the photos they took on their vacation because i didnt know what i was pressing to change english back. everything happen so fast and when i saw storage space i said "**bleep**" in my head.

please add a comfirmation on reformatting.. i think everything else i own always ask are you sure before performing the action.

i made an account just to say this and i feel like **bleep**.

[Peter · Accepted solution]

Remove the card, download Photorec, read the manual and bring back your parents´ pictures. Next time you are playing with a language you don't understand, remove the card first.

[TCampbell]

I realize it's easy to blame the product... but that would mean that the rest of us, who are reading our camera's messages in a language we understand, would have to click through redundant messages.  And of course... if you can't read the language for the first message asking if you are really sure... that wouldn't necessarily stop you from clicking through the 2nd message.

When you activate the menu system there are a number of menu "pages".  Each page is identified by a tab with a colored symbol/icon on it.  The language preference is usually found on a page with a yellow wrench icon.  But you were on a page with blue "play" (triangle icon) tab (which is where you find options to reformat... among other things.)

Consulting the manual would have put you on the correct tab even if you couldn't read the language on each row.  But from there you could have counted down the rows to the find the option that changes language (again... by consulting the manual.)

I realize you are frustrated that you've lost some images (you may be able to recover them IF you do not use that card again until you get some recovery software and attempt a recovery.  Shooting anything using that card in the camera will cause it to over-write your images and they'll be lost forever.)  

But consider everything that went wrong here:

a) your father borrowed your camera and changed the settings (in this case the  language) to something you can't read and then didn't change it back.  That's just not very nice behavior. 

b) you tried to randomly changing settings in the hope to find the one magic menu option that puts the camera back to English mode -- all while images you want are in the camera.  While it's true that there is a menu option to change the language.  There is also a menu option to (1) reformat the card and (2) another to "erase all images" from the card.  That means there's two menu options that do something you don't want and only one menu option to do what you do want.  The odds were against you.  

c) you didn't consult your manual -- which would have put you on the correct menu tab (and that menu tab doesn't contain any menu options that would have erased your images.)

Some good take-away advice here is:  

(a) when all else fails... read instructions and

(b) do not randomly activate menu options when important data is in the device.

But you did do one GOOD thing (I hope)... posting your dilemma to the Internet resulted in some advice that "deleted" images are not necessarily gone forever and you may yet be able to recover them.  Go get some recovery software (they'll probably charge you for it -- but usually it's not much.)

Hopefully you get your images back.  Good luck!

[JayJayR]

i used something called iskysoft and recover the photos.. almost 10g of data was recover and around 1600 pictures.. thank god. thanks for helping everyone.