Monday, January 4, 2010

Image/Data Recovery

Well, it finally happened. While I was on vacation my memory card crashed. But, this story has a happy ending.

When I did start uploading my images, everything was going as normal. I was uploading them/converting to DNG/importing them into Adobe Lightroom as I normally do all the time, as well as simultaneously backing them up on my external, a neat feature of Lightroom that kills two birds with one stone. Anyways, it uploaded 83 of the 395 some pictures, and crashed. I got 83 pictures, and looked on my CF card on my computer and did not see the rest, let alone ANY files. I popped it back into my camera, no files....FML.

I took it to a photo place thinking most of these incidences are usually recoverable, so no sweat. Well they called me and said they could not recover it.

So I get home, and look online for some recovery software that I could use to try it myself. I came across Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery (For Mac and Windows). I downloaded it for free (demo), and it lets you do everything up to but excluding the actual recovery. So, while it was free, I was able to scan my CF card, and sure enough, it found my long lost photos! It also found photos that had long been formatted over at least 15 times, from last semester!

This software rocks. I went ahead and purchased a key combo ($40) and then registered the software so I could recover my photos, knowing it had found them and worked.

It recovered 395 .nef 14-16mb raw files in about 8 minutes.

This also lets you scan any digital storage device, whether its a memory card or hard drive. It will find whatever files it can, and then let you choose which ones you would like to recover, so it can be handy for things other than memory cards, say in case your backup hard drive crashes with ALL your photos ;).

Grazie Gesù!

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