I saved the lost photos! Actually I didn’t but a nice piece of free software did.
After the last post I remembered a program that I’d used to help a friend salvage some lost photos on a memory card back last fall. I had done a great job and still had it installed on my laptop so I decided to give it a chance. It managed to recover all of the photos except for two and it got both of the photos I really wanted to save. All the lessons in the last post still apply, but along with that here are two free programs to help you out in case you forget like I did:
Smart Recovery – This is the program that saved my photos. It’s freeware and written specifically to recover photo and video files from media. The biggest feature is that is supports the camera raw formats for Nikon and Canon among others.
TestDisk/PhotoRec – Another nice pair of freeware recovery programs. TestDisk is for more meant for you computer hard drive and big problems like crashes drives. PhotoRec is like Smart Recovery a file recovery tool, but it’s a little more general purpose than Smart Recovery and can recovery Office files and Adobe files along with some less common formats. In this case it couldn’t get the missing photo files back, but I’ve had success with it in the past and would use it for non photo/video files.
Here are two samples (unprocessed) of what all the work was about:
