Deleted Pics.....PLEASE HELP!! :0(

[kate0680]

Hi Everybody,
This is my first visit to your forum and i'm in urgent need of your help
I'm from Australia and i just got a call from my mother who is overseas travelling in the US at the moment. As it turns out she was in tears cause she had deleted a whole bunch of their holiday pics. My dad was born in England and they made a stopover their on their way to the US to see his family of whom he hasn't seen for 30 years. As you can imagine my mum took 100's of photos, not only in England, but the last few weeks of travelling around America.

So..... from what i can gather, she has lost one card of approx 300 images. The card has been reformatted, cause this is what i told her to do after she had the pics burnt to CD (but in this case she actually hadn't ). Is this not the best way to delete your pics in one hit? i hope i haven't given her the wrong information??

So, yeah, the card has been reformatted and she had already started to shoot on the card again (only 3 shots) before she realised . So my question is, is there any way to retrieve these pictures??? I'm guessing they will go to pretty much any lengths to get these back.

My parents don't have a computer with them and they know very little about them, so i'm guessing they'll just want to take the card somewhere for somebody else to fix (if possible). They are in Oswego, NY at the moment.

Can anybody refer me to a place that might be able to help them out, cause they are both totally devistated :frown2:

Thanks for your help.
Kate.

[another view]

Don't do anything else with the card. I haven't used their service myself, but check this place out - they may be able to help. Also look for the "sticky" thread at the top of this forum for more advice.

I always reformat my cards after downloading, before I use them again. Actually I wait until I shoot that card again (which may not be right away) because I'll have a backup copy for that amount of time.

[kate0680]

Don't do anything else with the card. I haven't used their service myself, but check this place out - they may be able to help. Also look for the "sticky" thread at the top of this forum for more advice.

I always reformat my cards after downloading, before I use them again. Actually I wait until I shoot that card again (which may not be right away) because I'll have a backup copy for that amount of time.

Thanks for the swift reply, its much appreciated :thumbsup:
I'll contact the company that you sent in the link and see what they can do.

[another view]

Great, hope it works out! Let us know how it ends up if you get a chance.

[SmartWombat]

By re-using the card they have probably only lost 3 miages.
I have three programs:
ImageRecall - bought it first
ImageRescue - came with Lexar card
RescuePro - came with SanDisk card

ImageRecall has the friendly words "DON'T PANIC!" on the cover of the CD.
It has only been needed once, but it saved my images that I thought were lost.

I am about to try reformatting my 1G card in the camera then I'll report on how each program does on recovery.

OK here's the first pass:
Card formatted in 20D, last used in 1D RAW mode images (.CR2)
SanDisk RescuePro - seems to have locked up totally after 5 minutes, no screen refreshes
Lexar ImageRescue - 20% 12 images
ImageRecall - no read errors, 10000 sectors, 1 image
Over 2 HOURS later and ImageRecall hits 40%
An incredible 4 HOURS later and ImageRecall hits 83%

SanDisk RescuePro - found 76 files, still locked up totally
Lexar ImageRescue - 100% 76 images: recovers as .TIF 16 bit
ImageRecall - 100% 36188 read errors, 76 images as .TIF 16 bit

ImageRescue - fast 100% recovery (did I mention it's fast?)
ImageRecall - slow but sure, 100% recovery eventually (is 5 hours/GB slow?)
RescuePro - crashed and burned, recovered nothing

Now that was a 1G card, with a 4G card I expect ImageRecall to take all day.
But on the other hand it's only ImageRecall that reported the read errors.


Tried SanDisk RescuePro again, not on the Windows drive E: but on the "removable media #1" option instead and it crashes on reading the 76th file. Maybe it can't handle the errors reported by ImageRecall.

ImageRescue when doing low level media test reports no errors, but it's Lexar software reaidng a SanDisk card so I'm not sure it can be trusted. On the other hand ImageRecall might be overly sensitive, or applying the wrong multiplier to the number of sectors, 1024 instead of 1000, who can tell?

Whatever the cause - the SanDisk rescue program fails to rescue all the images from the SanDisk card.


I tried CardRecovery and it claimed to have recovered the .CR2 files directly.
But as they are greater than 10MB it refused to preview them from the 1DS.
Files from the 1DmkII were refused because they were raw not jpeg thogh only 7MB.
So it's of little use if you want to preview the files.
BUT it is the only one I've tried that recognises the Canon RAW format.
Thanks for the tip Kristin !

[kkraczek]

I use Card Recovery- it's downloadable, and for 40 bucks it was WELL WORTH the money- I've already had to use it twice, and when other programs I tried did not work, this one came through on the first try. Give it a try- I hope that this helps! (For anyone interested, it also recovers raw images)

http://www.cardrecovery.com/