At first glance you'll find TONS of shady software with iffy guarantees about what they'll actually recover (not to mention a pricetag that you'd probably rather ignore). Being a fan of open source software, the photo program I tried was PhotoRec. Here's what happened:
- Background info: I accidentally deleted about 25 photos on a 1GB SD card.
- PhotoRec: I installed and ran PhotoRec, which recovered all 25 photos very quickly. I quit the process after I saw it had recovered about 40 files, but it was clearly going to keep recovering old data from the card. Impressive!
- Here is one of the photos I recovered, taken by my friend Jen:
- Background info: An 8GB CF card that I have has been less than reliable. About two months ago it appeared to be working fine and I took over 500 photos on it while on a trip in UT/AZ/NV... only to get home and not have my computer recognize a single file on the card. All 500+ were corrupt. FREAK OUT. At this point, I just REALLY wanted those photos, so I headed over to a local camera store and shelled out $100 for them to do a data recovery. They were able to recover all of the files from my trip, as well as a few from before my previous format. Now $100 poorer, there was much rejoicing for actually having those photos.
- Also note: After their file recovery, the store formatted the card and returned it to me.
- PhotoRec: I decided to get that CF card out of retirement to try PhotoRec. Although I didn't feel like waiting all 4 estimated hours for a full recovery, I ran it for about 30 minutes and was impressed with the results. It recovered photos from my trip, the ones that Dan's Camera had already recovered, but what I found more impressive was that it was able to recover TONS of photos from before that trip. The card had been formatted at least twice since those photos were taken!
Not only does PhotoRec work well, but their logo is cool too!