Rescuing data from defective flash cards
If you’ve ever lost all your images of a memory card, due to failure, or by accidentally formatting it, you know how horrible it is. Back in the day, when you lose a roll of film to an accident, at least you can console yourself that you only lost up to 36 photos. Now, if you lose a large memorycard, you can lose hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos. Not very nice.
Luckily, your memory card is likely to not lose all of the images, even if some were to become erased or corrupted…
If you have an accident where you believe you may have lost some images, do the following:
- Don’t use the memory card any more. Don’t take any photos. Don’t try to format it. Don’t do anything that might write to the card.
- Take it out of the camera.
- Insert your memory card into a card reader
- Rescue your images!
Of course, the rescuing bit is the most tricky. Luckily, there are lots of services and software out there that can help.
If you use Linux, you could go the hardcore, manual way of recovering your photos, using Sleuthkit. If you don’t feel that confident or hardcore, Lexar bundles an application with its memory cards called ImageRescue. If you don’t have this piece of software (it’s for both Windows and OS X), it’s worth buying a Lexar memory card just for the software. Alternatively, you could buy it online for $30. A cheap price to pay, if you ask me, for a piece of software that could save your irreplacable photos.
Of course, there are loads of other software out there. I haven’t tried anything but Lexar’s software (why would I? It works :), but I’ve heard good things about CardRecovery ( (£22.80, US$39.95), Media Recover (US$30), and Photos Recover (US$30) PhotoOne Recover ($25) as well.
When you have recovered your photos, I would suggest testing the memory card thoroughly. If it never fails again, it may have been a freak one-off accident. If it ever does it again, take it back to the store you purchased it, and demand a replacement. Don’t jeopardise your cherished memories.
If your pictures are a matter of life and death
If your photos are so important to you that they cannot possibly be replaced, it may be worth getting professionals involved. Professional data recovery services cost an arm and both legs, but these guys really know what they are doing – using clean-rooms, and disassembling the memory card for you, if necessary, to ensure they can recover as much of the data as possible. There is a lot of variation between the success rates of professional services, so ring around and don’t commit until you are sure you have a service you trust. There are dozens of big data recovery firms around, and I’ve never used any, so I’d be hesitant to recommend anybody, but a quick search for Data Recovery in Google should bring up the companies relevant to your area.
Good luck!
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Insights, suggestions and comments
I’ve had the exact same problem a while ago.
While shooting with my Dynax 7D I ran out of space on my SanDisk cards, thus had to use an old Kingston Elite Pro, which is known to work less than perfect in that particular camera.
And it happened as it had to: After 20 images or so the camera didn’t show the remaining number of images, but -E–. The card was completely corrupted.
I tried PC Inspector file recovery, which did a decent job. It got me all except a few images back, which was ok.
Tobi
If your photos are a matter of life and death to you, don’t get into this mess in the first place, use lots of small cards rather than one big one.
other wise top advice
If you’re a cop or friends with one, you may also have access to tools in their computer crimes department where they too have advanced datarecovery software and equipment.
I highly reccommend Photo Rescue.
http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/
It worked brilliantly for me when other solutions failed and is quite inexpensive
Why worry about paying for software.
Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery is the best I’ve used. Its freeware, and they do paid versions of the software to recover more than just storage cards (so data recovery for the PC as well).
Managed to recover 200+ images and videos from an old sandisk sd card that had failed and was no longer recognised in windows or the camera as having any data on it. I lost 3 images in total.
Damn good stuff and its free. One thing is however.. its a wee bit difficult to find, so just google it :)
Also try Free Undelete. I don’t know if it works well for corrupted cards, but it is great in case you accidentally delete a photo or some other data file. Very easy to use and very fast.
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