Safe than Sorry

I take a lot of photos of my kids on my digital camera. I'm really bad about saving the photos to the hard drive on my husband's mac computer. Honestly, I have no idea how to so I have to wait for him to do it. So my 8GB disc had 908 photo files on it from December to April.

I'm semi careful with my disc, making sure to keep it dry, eject it when the computer says it's safe, but I never thought about not carrying it in my pocket. I've carried it in a pouch in my purse and it was fine but something happened to it in my pocket.

Last night I put it back in the camera and tried to take some photos of my dog. One click was all I got. Then it wouldn't work anymore and I thought the battery was dead. I looked at the display and it said CHA instead of a number count. I was like, what??
So I pushed the play button to view my photos and the display read, This Card cannot be used.
OH MY GOD! My stomach sunk. I started sweating, freaking out and needed to turn on my computer. Of course, the darned thing was taking FOREVER to boot up.
I put the card in the sd slot and only heard like a no no no beep. Not the nice bing bong it makes when it recognizes the card.
The computer was not seeing the card, I checked "my computer" and the port was not showing. I pulled out the card, licked (yes, licked) the metal end and slid it back in. Something in the spit worked and the computer recognized it had the card in. I opened the icon and it read, THIS FOLDER IS EMPTY.
I think I went into shock. Normally I would cry, shout and act like a child about a crisis. But I remained calm and tried to think of what to do. Those pictures were on that card and I had to try and recover them.
I Googled "sd card recovery" and clicked the first option. It was fate and I got lucky to find a program that would let you download it's program as an evaluation to attempt to recover lost photos or files. If it didn't work then you were not out the money. It's called winrecovery.
It searched my card and starting downloading the files into a file on it's program and after it's done, you can view the files/photos to ensure that it did it's job. After viewing you then have the option to purchase so you can save the files.
It worked!! It was worth the money to recover photos that were irreplaceable. Memories that would be lost.
Lesson learned? Don't forget to upload photos regularly. We'll see about that. No promises. But I do have a back up plan in the event of an emergency.