Never buy anything with Magic as part of it's name!

In preparation to go to Europe, my wife, who takes an incredible number of pictures per day, researched a method of picture storage to back up her pictures from a 14 day trip to Italy. According to the HYPE, She selected the EZDIGIMAGIC DVD burner. Now this is claimed to be a one step backup burner for memory cards and drives used in cameras.

My wife has a Canon 10 D she purchased new in May of 2003 since that time she has taken and backed up successfully over 25000 pictures. So she is no rube when it comes to handling her photos.

Enter the EZDIGIMAGIC! The requirements were simple, she wanted to be able to download her two 1GB micro drives every night and the two 1 GB micro drives that my daughter,same camera but not nearly as many pictures, would have along on the trip. The EZDIGIMAGIC was touted as having a basic "one touch backup capacity" of 4.+ GB, so it was perfect, in the ads.

After a day of shooting, the little drive was connected to local power through an adapter, the lights signaled it was ready and the cards were consecutively inserted and downloaded, lights flashed discs whirred and the machine said burning complete.

Having the wealth of experience of 20 years around computer products, she made another backup, when it was done, an hour later, she compared the backs of the burned DVD's and noticed the discs didn't look the same. She made a third. It was similar to the second. She made a fourth. by this time it was the wee small hours of the morning and after a day of travel, walking and picture taking this was all that anyone could be expected to do, but there was a dilemma. If the machine wasn't doing the correct thing, how could she erase the images she was capturing, not knowing if they were being backed up?

The purpose of buying this little drive at $500.00 dollars was to keep from having to take a $1000.00 computer on the trip to lug around and beat to a pulp and try to keep the poor from acquiring it, to use as a terrorist weapon, or worse yet, to put stolen or nonexistent items on Ebay. So the problem was to find a computer in Italy sufficiently powerful to read a DVD, and available to try a disc in.

Consider if a tourist came up to you and ask you to put an unmarked disc in your computer, the one you used to run your business? What are the chances you would let them, or even put it in and open the files yourself? Not likely you say? Well that was in fact the situation. So hours were spent trying to check and see what had been actually burned and backed up successfully on the DVD. These were precious hours not planned in a two week "once in a lifetime trip" of three people. However a trusting soul was finally found who allowed it, and the disc's were found to contain pictures, at least thumbnails and a number of File folders sufficient to suggest there was a backup process in operation.

Now here's the rub, though there were thumbnails and folders they were occasionally empty, and many of the pictures were lost. Not due to a lack of care on my wife's part but the screwy system we had trusted to back up the pictures, you know, DIGIMAGIC? the system that is so simple it's like magic, and that's what you need to make pictures out of the discs that it creates! Another issue was that there were only so many discs taken along for the trip thinking that they might in fact be hard to find in a country where the toilets are a hole in the floor.

So we did as much as we could before the trip to insure success, and tried after the trip to get the pictures from the discs. Here is where the wonderful support of the company really shows up. After numerous E-mails, containing a plethora of steps, and timings not mentioned in the pamphlet of instructions provided and an exhaustive series of "format-retake pictures-burn and reburn discs and try this, and order this program and try that program and some people have found this or that works. It became apparent that there were a number of missing pictures that were going to be missing forever.

I did finally receive the money back for the drive. they even claimed to have tried to recover some of the pictures to no avail. So after spending 100 hours following their trouble shooting instructions and only a three month wait for the results of their recovery efforts (ZILCH) I can clearly recommend NOT purchasing an EZ DIGIMAGIC DVD BURNER.

Sorry, but after taking and recording 25000 pictures successfully the missing 1300 pictures from a once in a lifetime vacation are just a little too much to swallow! Email me if you would like a copy of the ridiculous Emails that went back and forth during this insanity.

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