Memory Cards & My Mom

This is probably a nightmare that everyone encounters at some point: unintentionally deleting or formatting your digital camera's memory card. My typical blunder is not formatting my cards after downloading (and verifying and backing up) them. So, I end up adding photos to that card, but I digress. My mom recently called me up (I'm the official IT guy for my parents) and told me that she had accidentally deleted pictures from her camera. Pictures that she wanted and had not transferred to her computer. "Could they be recovered," she asked? Being the dutiful son that I am I said, "of course. Take it out of your camera (off, of course) and send it to me and I will see what I can do." Knowing what I know about storage and computers I had been meaning to do some research about the applications available to do this type of recovery on memory cards.

I remembered searching various photoblogs that I frequent to see what they were using. Digital Photography School probably had the most entries related to my quest. I also searched CNET because sometimes they have some interesting solutions (and free software) to help. Rather than bore you, here are some of the best links that I found in my not-too-exhaustive search:

Digital Photography School: 13 Tips for Using and Caring for Memory Cards
Digital Photography School:How to Recover Lost Images
CNET: Digital photography horrors: And then there were none (of your photos on the card)

Then comes the various software options: free/shareware, commercial, and services. CNET has quite a few options that were recommended by some of the blogs and you can find those here. Some of the sites listed above had commercial products available:

PhotoRescue
CardRecovery
Flash File Recovery
Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery

and so on. I tried several of the better rated freeware programs from CNET and had varying success. For example, the Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery (v 3.1) was able to recover 10 images from the 32 MB SD card. (By the way, this is one of the original cards provided with the Canon camera, hence it's small size.) Eight of the pictures were complete, two partials. This may not have been an issue with the recovery program. The ZAR recovery program, which was quite a bit more sophisticated than the other freeware programs, was able to recover 18 photos. Two partials (as before) and one which was probably usable.

Lastly I used the CardRecovery application. This tool allows you to review the photos, but not actually recover them, until you pay for it. A very nice selling point. It also recovered 18 photos from the card. The preview indicated that it was able to recover the same photos that the ZAR tool was. Of course, my mother was uncertain as to how many pictures were on the card before it was erased. (Or could she have meant formatted?) If we assume that 18 photos were on the card, then the ZAR and CardRecovery programs were both successful.

So, what would I recommend? With this limited subset of programs that I used: it would depend. For myself, a complicated interface is not too much of a hinderance. The ZAR tool is not something that I think I would recommend for my parents. The CardRecovery application was fairly straightforward to use and cheap at, I think, $30. I also note on their web site that it's recommended by Nikon. Both of these programs are for the Windows OS. I tested them on XP Pro. If anyone has a version for Macintosh, I would like to hear about it.

Another note: Many of the memory cards actually come with recovery software. I often read about the SanDisk software on photoblogs.