One day you will need this information…
Yikes! You got those once in a lifetime pictures of you and your honey having the dream vacation around the world…
or your kid scoring the winning goal at the state championships…
or your daughter getting married…
And you can’t get the pictures off of the camera card!
Yeah, it happens. Digital media, whether compact flash, SD cards, thumb drives and even hard dries FAIL.
At the worse possible time.
Always.
Here’s some good news though. Depending on what happened and what you do as soon as you realize you have a problem, you have a fair to great chance to get some or all of the pictures back!
Here are some recommendations – I have heard good reviews of these two but have not used them:
Digital Photo Recovery 3 – http://www.artplus.hr/adapps/eng/dpr.htm (free, Windows) – a good little program the focuses on recovering files from all types of camera cards
PhotoRescue – http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/index2.htm ($29, free trial, Windows and Mac) – a more full featured recovery program for all type of digital camera media
I personally use these two:
Easeus Data Recovery – http://www.easeus.com/ ($89.95, Windows) – a powerful software that not only recovers camera cards but also hard drives and other media like flash drives. I especially like it because it keeps the original file names and structure (as far as it is able to). I use this one first – it is an easy interface, does a good to great job of recovering and is fast. It’s worth the $89.95.
PC Inspector – http://www.pcinspector.de – (Free, Windows) – a really powerful software that is free. I use their File Recovery as I find it works better than the Smart Recovery software. The user interface is kind of strange and hard to figure out, it’s slower than other programs, and it renames the files. To it’s advantage it’s, well, FREE, and digs really deep onto disks – recovering files the others miss. I use it if the Easeus Data Recovery can’t find what I’m looking for.
Keeps these points in mind:
- All media fails – make sure you have good backups -especially of hard drives.
- If you think a drive is acting funny – STOP and immediately copy those valuable files somewhere else.
- If a card fails – do not continue to shoot- put it away and don’t use it until you can try and recover it. If you use it, it might overwrite the very files you are trying to recover.
- Take a deep breath. Relax. Call a friend. And then recover.
Have you ever had to recover files? What did you use? Leave us a comment with your story!
Stan
Other posts you will enjoy:
- Foto Friday – Compensate Jenn and I love checking out www.digishoptalk.com. They’re a site that has a very vibrant, lively community of hybrid and digiscrappers and store owners. One of the forums I like reading is one on photography. Having...
- Foto Friday – Back in a FLASH! Whaddya know, sometimes those classes really pay off! I’m back from DC with two cameras full of photos to comb through, and it hit me – looks like I’m learning something! I’ve sat through Stan’s “Know...
- Foto Friday – How to Get Clearer Pictures Aren’t digital cameras great? I got serious about photography when I was a teenager back in the dark ages of the 1970′s. Then I had my trusty Kodak Instamatic camera and photographed everything I could think...
- Foto Friday – A virtual camera I just found the coolest thing! One of the biggest questions we get teaching digital photography is all about f/stops (aperture) and shutter speeds. These basic concepts, along with the ISO speed, form the basis of...
- Foto Friday – Need digital camera info? Look here What’s digiscrapping without pictures? Pictures, and the memories they hold, are one of the prime reasons we are inspired to capture our memories through scrapbooking. As the scrapbooking world has transitioned to hybrid or digital, everybody...
May 29, 2009
Caroline B.
OMG, unfortunately, YES ! I loose the 6 firts months of my unique daughter !
Cruel Life !
It was 5 years ago, some may not exist anymore, don’t need them other time (Fingers crossed)
I try a lot of programs (may be some were not at the top with the tryout release ??) :
- OnTrack Easy Recovery
- Davory Data Recovery
- Magic Data recovery
- File Scavenger (this works very weel for me)
- Recover It All !
- Active Uneraser
- VirtualLAb Data Recovery
- Acronis Recovery Expert
I think it was all… the better for me was File Scavenger, but I loose files definitivelly !
Caroline B.’s last blog post..Awards