Getting your photos back for free after accidently formatting your memory card

<p>I took many photos of my wife's baby shower last week. The next day, I took

a few more shots and wanted to see how much space they took up before

transferring them to the laptop. I went into the format menu of my 20D, and

found out they took up 1.2 gigs. Of course, instead of canceling out of the

format menu, I accidently formatted the card.</p>

 

<p>

Being no dummy, I removed the card from the camera so I didn't overwrite any of

the data that I knew was still on the card. I then promptly confused it with my

SECOND 2 gig card, and couldn't figure out which freshly formatted card was

which. I sighed, stored both 2 gig cards carefully in my luggage, and finished

up the vacation with my 512 meg backup card.

</p>

 

<p>

When we got home, I started googling for how I could get my files back. I found

a ton of software that promised to retrieve my files, but I had to pay for them

and I'm lazy. I'd have to go all the way downstairs to get the credit card! I

started exploring my free options.

</p>

 

<p>

The first piece of software I tried was <a href =

"http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm">PC Inspector File

Recovery</a>. It had a pretty strange interface that took some figuring out.

Once I did, it scanned the card and found most of the photos, but for some

reason it didn't find any of the photos in the middle of the sequence. It found

IMG_07xx.JPG files and IMG_09xx.JPG files but no IMG_08xx.JPG files. Recovery

was straightforward and I was able to recover files one at a time.

Unfortunately, when I selected more than one file to recover them all at once,

the program crashed with an "Access Violation". Ug.

</p>

 

<p>

My next attempt was a program called <a href =

"http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html">Restoration</a>. Restoration

took a long time to scan the card, and no wonder. It found more files and

folders on the CF card than would actually fit on a 2 gig card. Many of them

had strange unicode character names. It did find all of the actual images that

were on the card, but again, you could only highlight one file at a time to restore.

</p>

 

<p>

The final program I tried was <a href = "http://www.z-a-recovery.com/">Zero

Assumption Recovery</a>, which costs 99 dollars, but comes with <a href =

"http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm">a free digital image

recovery mode</a>. I think ZAR is supposed to be a heavy duty recovery program

for hard drives, so they give you a little taste of how well it works with flash

card files. It worked great for my images. It gives you a little map of the

flash card and where the data is stored on it, and it worked pretty fast. It

didn't find any files that weren't there, and was the only program that found

the mysteriously missing IMG_08xx.JPG files. There were a couple of files that

it could not recover; I suspect those were files I deleted on the memory card

and then took more pictures on top of them before I formatted it, and so would

of course be unrecoverable.

</p>

 

<p>

The big downside is that unlike the previous two programs, ZAR does not remember

the original file name, so instead of IMG_0810.JPG you would wind up with

i00014.JPG. Also, it recovers .CR2 files and gives them the extension .TIF, so

you have to manually change the file extension in order to open it properly in

your raw converter of choice.

</p>

 

<p>

Be sure to check <a href =

"http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm">the page about the

digital image recovery mode</a> to note the system requirements and caveats; if

I read that page correctly the free mode will recover Canon's raw files but not

Nikon's raw files. Presumably the full version would recover any type of file.

</p>

 

<p>

Anyway, I had a great experience with it. If you've never accidently deleted a

file before, or accidently formatted the wrong memory card, I highly recommend

getting either this program (or another one if you find one you like or are

using a Mac) and practice getting the files back from a freshly formatted card!

Be prepared.

</p>

 

<p>

(P.S.: The tools page on the ZAR website has a tool for a free disk space

visualizer that's pretty awesome. It shows you what kind of crud is cluttering

up your disk, and how big it is. My brother used this on his machine only to

find 17 gigs of WAV files (on a 40 gig drive) that the previous owner had left

on the hard drive.)

</p>

<i>My brother used this on his machine only to find 17 gigs of WAV files (on a 40 gig

drive) that the previous owner had left on the hard drive.)</i>

<p>

A good reason to remember to thoroughly scrub your hard disks before you sell your

computer. A friend of mine had his identity stolen when his former dotcom employer went

bankrupt and sold their servers on the bay without scrubbing the disks.

As far as scrubbing goes, (since we're on the topic)I'd suggest Privacy Guardian by PC Tools if you ever need to really wipe something. Its main purpose is to wipe out all the temp files and cookies and such in one fell swoop, and it also has a "bleaching" function to render data unrecoverable. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but I know it's not more than 30 bucks. Worth the money if, like me, you handle all your financial stuff over the internet.