Recovering Images

For every shot you took the odds go down. If it was only five or ten shots since deleting then *maybe* you might some back. If it was 100 you're SOL.

I had a batch of images "evaporate" while I was reorganising files and folders some time back - all the images taken on a particular day/at a particular location. By the time I realised, I had done lots of other shuffling about and deleting of files and folders. However, when I ran ... ?Recuva (I think) on the laptop I'd used to handle the import/export, it found all the files (deleted from an external hard-drive) in the recycle bin. Now before you get your hopes up, they were nearly all RAW files (.CR2) and the recovered files were about 20-ish MB in size, each, which was the "right" size - but I could only preview and open a handful.

Further research suggested that the headers were probably corrupted by the deletion/re-writing but if I could graft a new header into the file using something called a hexadecimal editor, it was more than likely that the image info was still there and in good health. As you've probably figured out, I haven't yet got around to doing that (not enough long, cold, miserable winters since! - and I did get lucky in that the one image I really wanted was one of the few that survived)

Moral of the story: scan the computer aswell as the card ... and be prepared to find an awful lot of stuff that you really didn't want to see again! :pac:

How much is recoverable will depend on many factors.

If the card was nearly full there is a greater chance of data loss. The less space used on the card the better the chance of recovering the images.