macfidelity

I had to recover images from a Sandisk Ultra II card (FAT fs).

Problem:

• Card was completly filled with images
• Card was formatted then
• Several new images were written to the card

Conclusion:

It was pretty clear that there was only a small chance to get all images back. Each write to the SanDisk after having formated has destroyed several files…according to the first look

Used tools:

• First idea was using the trial of GetDataBack (commercial) on Windows. GDB found about 120 files all in all
• Second idea was using Zero Assumption Recovery (free) which found about 250 files on the card

I have mentioned another tool in this thread, unfortunaly this tool is not able to handle .CR2 files so i didnt even tested it in this case.

Links:

• Z-A Recovery
• GetDataBack

Looks like its not that unusual that users do accidently delete their images or just got problems with the filesystems itself on memory-cards or similar.

Today i stumbled upon an application for all major platforms ( Windows, Linux, Mac OS X ….) called:

PhotoRec

Quote:

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its ‘Photo Recovery’ name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU Public License. PhotoRec is a companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again. You can download them from this link.

For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or memory support you are about to recover lost data from. Important: As soon as a pic or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any missing, do NOT save any more pics or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This means that even using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

Links:

• PhotoRec Homepage