We had a small crisis on our hands one evening at our digital photography camp this summer. Two individuals both had their camera storage cards wiped out, with a significant number of unsaved images on each card. (Strangely enough, they were sitting next to each other, even though the two events were completely unrelated – different cameras, different computers, different kinds of cards, different causes.) When it became clear how completely gone the images were, I told the two I would spend some time researching the process of recovering files from cards during our dinner break, but not to get too hopeful. The two participants were stoic and brave, but you could tell they were pretty upset about the loss of so many pictures they had taken on our trip to Mt. Rainier earlier that day.
In searching online, I pretty quickly came across several references to a Windows program called PC Inspector, which not only had good reviews but had the added benefit of being free. It can recover some damaged files, but it’s main focus is files that were accidentally deleted. As long as you haven’t taken a lot of new pictures with the card, they can be recovered. (It will work for other forms of storage, too, such as hard drives and USB memory sticks.)
I downloaded it, fired it up and tried to access the missing files on one of the cards. After what seemed like forever, a file appeared in the recovery window. A few moments later, a second one. It wasn’t fast, but over the course of a few hours it recovered all of the images on both of the cards – and there were hundreds. The participants were thrilled, and I have a great new tool in my box o’ solutions. It’s always fun to be able to fix someone’s disaster!