I waited patiently for 71582788 minutes

The pictures of the dead Epargyreus clarus I photographed yesterday were still on the camera's CompactFlash memory card when I mistakenly erased them last nite. They were not really important, but I decided to try to recover them anyway. The card, by SanDisk, had come with a file recovery software called RescuePro. I started running it and this message appeared on the screen.

That would be 1193046.5 hours or 49710.2 days or 136.2 years! So I waited.

It took about 71582788 10 min to recover the erased pictures. Later, when I was saving the recovered files, the same message came up again, although it took even less, only a few minutes, to write them to the hard drive.

RescuePro recovered the smaller JPG files, but missed the Olympus RAW files that were also on the card.