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May 29, 2008
[ STUFF HAPPENS ]
AS THE GREAT AMERICAN STOIC PHILOSOPHER, F. GUMP, once so pithily observed: “Excrement happens!” And for digital photographers it happens in especially aggravating forms.
Take, for instance, the experience of B. He has just bought a Sony compact camera, similar to one he once owned but has since been purloined and no doubt offered for auction on the internet or been converted into cash at the neighbourhood pawn broker. Anyway, we digress.
As they say on the aeroplanes, all cameras may look the same but there are subtle differences. And in the case of B’s Sony the subtle difference seems to have been in the handling of image file deletion. He thought he was deleting one file but he erased them all. He tells us this with a note of depair in his voice, assuming that his priceless pictures are gone forever into cyber space.
It’s no often that we get the privilege of being a bringer of good news, but we were able to cheer B up no end. Deleting files on a camera memory card does not destroy them. It merely hides them. And they can be tracked down and recovered with a little help from a free application called PC Inspector Smart Recovery (tinyurl.com/374d8b)
When files are erased from a memory card it is not the image data that is deleted, merely the direction to it contained in the disc’s table of contents. (It’s not really called table of contents, but you get the idea.) So if all the files are erased it is akin to ripping the table of contents out of a book and leaving the chapters intact.
PC Inspector Smart Recovery locates and recovers data on a memory card, as long as it hasn’t been corrupted in some way, such as being over-written by a new file. Recovery can be done from the camera, connected to the computer through a USB, or it can be done with the card in a card reader.
We bulk erased 58 JPEG files from an SD card and recovered 56 perfectly. Two were corrupted and were only partially restored.
OK, that was too easy. Let’s throw a real challenge at PC Inspector Smart Recovery by reformatting the card in a different camera. The card was originally used in a Canon, so the files have the Canon naming convention. What if we format the card in a Nikon?
PC Inspector still found 57 or the 58 Canon photos and perfectly recovered all but three of them.
We shot and erased an AVI movie file on yet another camera, using the same SD card, and attempted to recover it with PC Inspector. Results were not reassuring. VLC Media Player snagged on some hidden corruption and told us that the file was “broken”. We tried again with a different camera with the same result. It seems that once a movie file is erased in a compact camera the chances of recovery are virtually nil.
PC Inspector will also recover most RAW files. We shot and erased four Nikon NEF RAW files and recovered them perfectly.
And here’s a PS: if you buy a Lexar memory card you will probably find that you are offered a free download of their Image Rescue software. Be warned, the offer expires shortly after you buy the card and you cannot download it twice, so save the installation file.
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Posted by terry at May 29, 2008 12:36 AM
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