Rescuing Photos

Rescuing Photos

I had this conversation the other day 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!

Why Not? Because 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. If you are prepaed you should not panic.

It's simple to try -- Format your memory card and then run the software and rescue your images. Try this on a card that you have already downloaded, if you know that you have recovered before you won't freak out if you actually NEED to recover images. You can try this for FREE.

PhotoRescue makes some really great image recovery software. 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.

Your card might even come with some rescue software try that too.
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.

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 personally have had a three of cards fail.

And 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. Like I said you can also try the one that is for your card type (Sandisk, Lexar, etc.) (some cards come with rescue software for free).