Tip-Of-The-Week

December 29, 2006

From the Free Computer Consultant

http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com

Recover / undelete photos from flash disk

Flash Disk empty, corrupt? NO PHOTOS? Accidental deletion?

What greater holiday horror can you imagine than inserting the flash disk from your camera into your PC and finding there aren't any pictures there?

Or what if you delete photos on the flash disk after you THINK you successfully transferred them onto your computer?

GOOD NEWS for you!

As you may or may not know, deleting data from a disk of some type with Windows (or DOS for that matter) does not actually erase the file or data in the file. It just marks the file as deleted and available to be overwritten in the disks allocation table. So as long as you haven't written more data to the disk there is an excellent chance you can still access the data even if deleted.

Even better news is that can still work for you in the case of a corrupt disk, like flash memory for a camera.

Just this past weekend my daughter was going to empty our digital camera of the recent photos before we opened Christmas gifts. (Some of the pictures I had just taken minutes before.)

When she previewed them on the camera, all looked good. But when she inserted the Secure Digital Disk into the PC, the disk showed as a drive with a few files of wierd character names and NO PHOTOS! She hollered for Dad...

I tried the disk back in the camera and the preview said "No Photos". Yikes! My wife will kill me! (All technology is my fault, you know.)

Tried it in my laptop with its built in SD slot; nothing.

I found PCInspector's free file recovery program, but after installing the program and recovering the files, none of them were valid jpeg's.

Panic increasing... and we're gonna be late to my dad's..

Then I found Easy Photo Recovery, which is $29.95, but it allows you to do a recovery and VIEW THE RESULTS BEFORE PAYING! It found all 80 photos plus another 100 that had been previously deleted (like I said, they are still there until overwritten). I was able to view the photos to make sure they were indeed recoverable before paying.

I paid the $29.95, they emailed the key immediately, I activated the software and recovered the photos.

While PCInspector is free, in addition to not recovering usable files, I will also say that PCInspector was a tad bit confusing (under pressure anyway) and Easy Photo Recovery was child's play - just like they promise. I highly recommend Easy Photo Recovery.

Visit my photo recovery page for more info and screenshots.

Hope this information is of use to you, that's it for this week.

When was the last time you backed up YOUR PC?

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