I need photo recovery help

[Jim Boyd]

Somehow I lost a number of photos on a couple of CF cards.

Since the time I took the photos, the cards have been reformatted twice.

I've tried a number of data recovery software products, and have had only moderate success. Most of the products I've used will recover all my photos prior to last formatting, but only a couple will recover photos from the formatting before that, and those only recover a few photos.

I think I'm going to have send these cards to a data recovery service. Does anyone know of a company they've used and had success with?

Thanks for your help.

[thumper]

Jim:

Have you tried the photo recovery software from mediaRECOVER. Back when I was in the IT business, I used it often. Usually I could recover images up to seven deletions deep.

[tc95]

Jim do you use Mac or PC...??

[Yasir]

Originally Posted by Jim Boyd

Somehow I lost a number of photos on a couple of CF cards.

Since the time I took the photos, the cards have been reformatted twice.

I've tried a number of data recovery software products, and have had only moderate success. Most of the products I've used will recover all my photos prior to last formatting, but only a couple will recover photos from the formatting before that, and those only recover a few photos.

I think I'm going to have send these cards to a data recovery service. Does anyone know of a company they've used and had success with?

Thanks for your help.

Hello,

We send customers to DriveSavers Data Recovery Services. There was at least one person we sent who used them and had a successful data recovery from their memory card. They have given us a discount code for our customers: DS22692

Regards,

Yasir M. Hakim
ProfessionalCameraRepair.com
713-621-3627

[JustAnotherGinger]

Hopefully this can help, anyone who has the misfortune to delete images. You can recover from SD or Compact flash cards, I am not sure, but I also think it works for hard drives. Very handy, somewhat confusing, but depends on which version you use. The one I have runs in DOS. Anywho, it is called testdisk. you can get it here TestDisk Download - CGSecurity
It is free, but they take donations. In my opinion, they just saved you butt! Dontate!

I used it on an sd card, and recovered everything recent, and even stuff that was six months old :)

[gcccaldw2]

When my hard drive failed (the disk directory corrupted and took out all my photos from the last year and a half because I stupidly didn't backup anything) the IT guy at my work gave me a cd loaded with lots of free ware.
Hiren's BootCD 14.1 - All in one Bootable CD » www.hiren.info


Try the Disk Digger program. It found 30,000+ images on the failed hard drive. The hard drive is a mac hsf formatted drive and I used my Windows laptop to run DiskDigger on it. In my case it didn't keep the file names. It labeled the images based on the drive sector it was found in. It did however keep some but not all of the meta data.

DiskDigger | Undelete and recover photos, documents, music, videos, and more!

Lexar also has a recovery software that was recommended to me by several photographers.

Lexar® Image Rescue® 4 Software | Lexar

I know that doesn't answer your original question but hope it helps you or at least someone else searching through posts.

[SurfaceIntervalMusings]

Originally Posted by WhiteWolfPhoto

Hopefully this can help, anyone who has the misfortune to delete images. You can recover from SD or Compact flash cards, I am not sure, but I also think it works for hard drives. Very handy, somewhat confusing, but depends on which version you use. The one I have runs in DOS. Anywho, it is called testdisk. you can get it here TestDisk Download - CGSecurity
It is free, but they take donations. In my opinion, they just saved you butt! Dontate!

I used it on an sd card, and recovered everything recent, and even stuff that was six months old :)

Do you know if photrec works with RAW files? it doesn't reference RAW on the web page. Thanks.

[JustAnotherGinger]

Originally Posted by SurfaceIntervalMusings

Do you know if photrec works with RAW files? it doesn't reference RAW on the web page. Thanks.

Yes, it was RAW files that I recovered :)

[SurfaceIntervalMusings]

Originally Posted by WhiteWolfPhoto

Yes, it was RAW files that I recovered :)

Thanks! I am using it as I type, and I will be happy to donate to them if it works.

I made a really stupid mistake last week while in San Francisco. I was shooting with my D700 and D7000 and it never occurred to me that the file numbers might be the same at some point and they moth use DSC a the front of the file name. Needless to say I mistakenly lost somewhere around 2,000 photos while backing them up. I have since changed the D7000 filename setting to D7K. if this program works it will save me a trip back.

[JustAnotherGinger]

Once you get the whole "partition" thing figured out it is easy. I was using the Canon RAW program and went to delete one image...and apparently all images were selected...POOF...gone. They don't go to the trash when you do that. I flipped out, and after 6 hours of searching on the internet for a program that was actually FREE, I found it. Needless to say, I donated :)

[SurfaceIntervalMusings]

I certainly didn't meant to take over this thread from the OP. That being said I happened to be using Lexar Professional CF cards which actually come with a small slip of paper in the box, containing a registration code for Image Rescue 4. I didn't realize this until I called Lexar a few minutes ago.

To the OP I have an extra code for you if you want to send me a PM.

[auddii]

Originally Posted by SurfaceIntervalMusings

I certainly didn't meant to take over this thread from the OP. That being said I happened to be using Lexar Professional CF cards which actually come with a small slip of paper in the box, containing a registration code for Image Rescue 4. I didn't realize this until I called Lexar a few minutes ago.

To the OP I have an extra code for you if you want to send me a PM.

That's awesome. You can download it and scan for free, but you need the code to use it (you can buy a code online for ~$35). It's supposed to be used with their cards, but it did recognize my 1TB drive. Good to know that the code comes in the card packaging, but I shouldn't have thrown mine out! Maybe it's time to buy a new card...

[Jim Boyd]

Tony: I use both the Mac and PC.

Yasir: Thank you for the info, I'll try them if all else fails, and thank you for the code.

James and William: I've tried IR4 and it did a decent job, but didn't find the files I needed. William, I'll try the other programs you suggested.

Stephene: I'll certainly try Test Disk. What do I have to lose.

Thank you everyone for your help.

[Rson]

Reformatting twice won't lose the images, the question is did you add more images after the reformat. If you did then the lost images are prob gone. It isn't the reformatting that deletes images, when you add more data that overwrites the blocks that had the data.

[Jim Boyd]

Rich,

Yes, I shot more images after the reformatting. But here's what I don't understand: I formatted these cards probably ten times and shot images over them as many times, but I can still recover tons of images that are close to a year old. Why can I recover those?

Jim