Data Recovery
If you are shooting digital photos sooner or later you will experience lost photos, this can be caused by your flash card becoming corrupted or even by formatting or erasing your card before you have managed to save your images to your hard disk and you can be sure that this will happen when you have taken some memorable or difficult to replace photos. If this happens to you the first thing to do is NOT to panic. In most cases the photos can be recovered but it is important not to write anything else to the card before attempting to recover your data. In most cameras when you format your flash card the data that is on the card is not actually deleted, all that happens is the space is flagged as being available to store more data so by not writing anything else to the card there is a possibility that your photos may be recovered. Flash cards can become corrupted as well, this can be caused by a number of different possibilities, i.e., camera malfunction, switching the power off before the camera has finished writing etc.,
There are various utilities available to help you recover your photos but some cannot connect to your camera when it is connected to the computer so my advice would be to purchase a flash card reader. External flash card readers are readily available in either USB or Firewire connections and once connected to your computeer they show up as another (removable) drive. I actually find this a more convenient method of downloading photos.
As I mentioned earlier there are various utilities available to recover your data, Photorescue, is one of the better known products and is available as a demo version, so if you are having problems with a flash card download Photorescue and run it in demo mode, the programme will show you if your files are recoverable. If it shows your files as recoverable then you can purchase the product which allows the actual recovery. At the time of writing Photorescue is available to purchase from the website for $29
Another free image recovery utility is called PC Inspector Smart recovery This software supports the following picture formats: .jpg, .tif, .crw ,Fuji .RAF , Olympus .ORF. Video files in .avi, QuickTime .MOV format and audio files in .wav, .DSS format can also be recovered.
And one other utility available as freeware is Digital Image Recovery, this utility does require that the card be seen as a drive so the use of an external card reader is neccesary. If you have difficulty in obtaining this utility, drop me a line using the e-mail link on the left hand menu and I can e-mail it back to you (File size 572 KB)
I hope you find this information useful and if there is anything you would like to see added to this page just drop me a line.