Rescuing Photos

I had this conversation last night and thought that I would re-blog something that I have talked about in the past.

What do you do when a CF card fails?
Freak out? Hyperventilate? Swear? Cry?
No!
You will have practiced and know that you can recover these images.

If you reformat a card, or if a card fails -- STOP. Do not take any more photos. Use the rescue software.

Kind of life a firedrills -- try a practice run and rescue your photos. Do this to learn how to rescue your images when your adrenaline isn't running and you are freaked out because you formated your memory card before you downloaded or your get an error message from your memory card.

It's simple to try -- Format your memory card and then run the software and rescue your images.

PhotoResuce (the world's best image recovery software) has been updated to version 3.1.10. In addition to the usual RAW file format updates, this version allows the extraction of large thumbnails from RAW files. As raw files of top DSLRs grow bigger, so do the embedded JPEG (or even small raw) thumbnails. While their quality obviously is not as good as the raw files, they can save a shoot when the raw data is damaged beyond recovery.

This option is available in the option screen of the advanced recovery and is disabled by default.

This 3.1.10 update is free for all customers who have purchased their version after Jan 1st, 2008 and $19 for others. Please note that registered versions of PhotoRescue never expire. Customers who have lost their copies ofPhotoRescue and do not want to upgrade are still be able to download 3.1.9 (and also 2.1.x) from the Photorescue website.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-9318-9737

PhotoRescue is the best and fairest picture and data recovery solution for digital film - sd cards, compact flash, memory sticks, microdrive, etc... Featuring innovative recovery algorithms, PhotoRescue displays reliable previews of the recoverable pictures. What you see is what you recover, both on the Windows and on the Apple Mac OS X platforms. PhotoRescue has been awarded 4.5 stars by PCMagazine. PhotoRescue is available in three different versions.

Please note that ANY storage is subject to a problem. For your hard drive the general consensus is not IF your hard drive will fail, but WHEN it will fail.

Yes, memory cards can also fail.
I have had a three of cards fail.
Twice I have also formatted over photographs that were not yet downloaded to my computer. When we were on our honeymoon we somehow reformatted a CF card that had not been downloaded. Argh! But all was not lost. I was prepared for this!

How?Well, I had practiced this scenario, at home, under no stress. I HIGHLY recommend that you run through the recovery process under non vasodilating conditions because when it happens your adrenaline will be running and it will be much easier to stay calm knowing that you know how to rescue.

So, if you reformat a card, or if a card fails -- STOP. Do not take any more photos. Use the rescue software.

I have tried three programs -- they are free and you buy them if they work for you (they provide a free trial to see that they did indeed rescue your images). Sometimes one program works better than another.
You can also try the one that is for your card type (Sandisk, Lexar, etc.) (some cards come with rescue software for free).

Also note that most CF cards also have a lifetime guarantee on them. I have used this twice, once for a Sandisk 512K card about 6 years ago and once for a 4 GB Sandisk card in 2008. Sandisk replaced the card both times free, including no shipping charges.