Reading Andrew Kantor‘s ‘Legal Rights of Photographers V2.0’ made me want to share my recovery thoughts with everyone. Working at a camera repair shop I deal with a lot of image recoveries. As a photographer, you can sometimes get faced with an ultimatum of deleting a photograph or having your equipment taken. We know police can not take our gear but we also know that if we are at a goverment owned property that clearly states no photography, one must obey. I have never personally been given an ultimatum, however have in fact needed to use an Image Recovery software for my own media cards. Back in the day I was using an Olympus C-4040 which used Smart Media Cards. These were horribly designed cards and prone for failure. I took a trip out to the Grand Canyon and had a huge photo project I was doing. I took over 600 photos in 4 hours while walking around the Canyon. When I got home from my trip and tried to download the photos they were all corrupted and/or missing. Years later when software was released for recovery I gave it a try and managed to recover a few photos from the trip. Unfortunatly none were from the Grand Canyon but I know the recovery worked even years later after not using the camera again.
What software do I like?
On a Windows machine I prefer Lexar’s Image Rescue 3. It is much better than the previous RAM hog of version 2 and recovers like a champ. Lexar gives the software free with their Professional cards.
On a Mac I prefer Prosoft’s Data Rescue II as it really gets deep into the data and even pulls up the camera’s temp files. I have also used Lexar’s Image Rescue 3 on the MAC which runs smoother than on the Windows machine.
A great link which Andrew Kantor linked to in his PDF has a big list of recovery software.
Scott
