This is not a joke, so please don't laugh for too long...

...but I appear to have a corrupted RAW file on my computer. Back in march, I got some shots of a robin in the snow. On Tuesday I decided to reprocess the raw file in bibble and did so - no problem, making new tif and jpeg files from it. On Wednesday morning I opened the same folder in bibble to process some more of the images and my robin CR2 file was now showing in the thumbnails as a picture of a cat licking its lips!! The file size has leapt from around 12mb to 29mb and it will no longer open in the main bibble window, CS3 or Bridge - only in bibble thumbnails. Norton says that I have no viruses, it hasn't happened to any other files that I can see so far. There is nobody in my house capable of doing this manually to one of my files including me. I am not drunk, totally senile or messing about, just very worried. Has anybody else ever heard of such a thing or have any suggestions as to what I should do to safeguard the rest of my image library, please?
Eric

You shouldn't have kicked that black cat last Friday.

Looks like a bunch of garlic and silver cross on your desk may be one solution?

Well there's a clue in the 29Mb - isn't that roughly the size of your 8bit tiffs Eric

Did you ever actually TAKE an image of a cat licking its lips?

If so, where was the file on your machine and what was its file name?

What was the location and file name of the Robin?

What does windows explorer say the cat image file type is?

A standard installation of Bibble doesn't read or even see TIFF files.

This sounds like some sort of file naming/renaming/image over write problem on the face of it - now what did I spend an hour explaining to you last Wednesday - let me see........oh yes...BACKUP

If you don't get to the bottom of this call me on my LL tonight - I saw the missed call on my mobile and tried calling back but no answer - out cat hunting???

The black cat is a standard image that Bibble presents when it can't read a file, or the file is corrupt.
I think the problem is down to the sidecar file containing processing data that Bibble writes when you convert the file being unreadable/incompatible with other software, a subsequent attempt to open the file in Photoshop seems to be the trigger for file corruption.
It seems to be more of an issue with Mac machines but does occur with PCs too, the general concensus is that it happen's most frequently if the memory card is just deleted and not formatted frequently; although I think its an incompatibility between programmes
http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00EpCe

This program will find lost and corrupt .CR2 files (and most other RAW files too) its $40 ish
http://www.diskinternals.com/flash-recovery/

It sounds to me like you've accidentally saved your TIFF over the top of your RAW file. Not a lot you can do about it now unless you've got it backed up.


Paul

It sounds to me like you've accidentally saved your TIFF over the top of your RAW file

That should not be possible as they have different file extensions. You would have to have saved the TIFF, deleted the CR2 file and changed the file extension of the TIFF to CR2 - I doubt that has been done accidentally

What Nigel says rings true as I used to use Bibble back in my D1X days (yes - it has been going that long) and I remember something similar to this when there was a file read error

Agree with Barrie here, a RAW file should be a non-destructive file type, it might be just a case of finding the .CR2 file in the folder where it is and deleting its sidecar file, as this seems to be where the problem lies.

Does the version of Bibble you are using have an option to 'clear the cache'? This may well do the trick as it will force all the RAW files to be reprocessed from 'scratch' (Nikon's NX2 and Lightroom work in this way)

Thanks for the input everyone. It would appear that somehow either I or some of my software may have corrupted the raw file and it is scrap. Fortunately it was backed up so all is well. I was worried that it might have originated from a security issue coming as it did within a week of somebody emptying my bank account, but it hasn't affected any other files so it looks like stupidity was the probable explanation.
Eric

Cool, sorry eric, I'll send the money back,, was only going to buy a 600mm F4

You'd need a larger overdraft than mine for that Mark. Anyway you can't buy one of those or I'll have to buy a sig 800.