Restoring Lost Images

Every once in a while, the situation arises when your images seem to be gone. Or, you accidentally delete images that you meant to keep. Or, You accidentally format a memory card without offloading all the images. Here’s how to restore them.

No need for panic. Just because you can’t see the images, doesn’t mean they’re not there on the card. You simply can’t access them through the usual means. The directory structure may have been corrupted, and is therefore unreadable.

The same is true of erasing images, or formatting the card. The reference to the images is removed from the directory, but all the image information remains in tact. All we need to do is scan through the entire card to identify the data that appears to be image files, and restore them as such to another disk.

There’s an app for that. It’s called Data Rescue.

Now in version 3, this application, available for both Mac and Windows, simply scans the media, identifies known file types, and restores them.

Just to put things in perspective, I’ll tell you how well it works:

One day, through impatience and sheer stupidity, I accidentally erased an entire 250GB external drive while attempting instead to erase an optical disk; a CD-RW that is.

After powering down the drive so no new data was written to it, I did a little research and purchased Data Rescue II and a second drive (which I needed anyway). I quickly read the instructions and ran the application. It took about six hours to scan the entire drive, and a few more to restore the files to the new one.

When I had finished, not only had I recovered all the files, with their original filenames in their original folders, but also files that I had deleted years ago!

The nice thing about this software is that it works on all types of media, even Flash Memory. You see, Utilities like DiskWarrior only work on known file systems, and cannot repair the directories of the proprietary file systems that cameras use. Data Rescue doesn’t attempt to repair the directory, it just finds the files themselves.

So, a quick test on an SD card recently formatted by my D90 confirmed what I already believed. File restoration is quite possible, even if you accidentally re-format your card. The only time it WON’T work is if you write new files to the card, or if you use a secure erase option which writes 0s over the original data. Then it’s gone forever.