PhotoRescue Now Recovers Deleted Images from Hard Drive Sources

[Jason Dunn]

I don't know if I've written about PhotoRescue before, but if I haven't, here's the scoop: it is, bar none, the best photo recovery tool I've ever used - and now that they've added support for hard drives, it's even more useful. Version 2.0 was great, but a bit complex to use, version 3.0 added a great wizard but lacked the ability to scan anything but a memory card, and now with version 3.1 they've added the missing piece: the ability to target any hard drive and scan it for missing files.



PhotoRescue is one of those tools that you hope you'll never need, but when you do, it's a lifesaver. I was in just such a situation: I went to Hawaii at the end of 2006, and it was my first big vacation with the Nikon D200. I was still experimenting with RAW processing at that point, looking for the best tool for processing. That vacation I shot in RAW + JPEG.

 

I used my NEXTO hard drive to make one copy of the images, and was using Lightroom (then in it's highly unstable 1.0 incarnation) on my laptop to process a second copy of the images. The Fujitsu P7010 I was using didn't have enough CPU power to process RAW images very easily, so I didn't get through more than a fraction of the 1500+ images I ended up shooting. So I had two sets of data, one set partially processed. When I came home I began testing DxO Optics Pro 4, using a third copy of the data (it seemed like a good idea at the time). Then I went back to Lightroom...and back to DxO...and ended up getting a little confused about which data set was which, and abandoned the project for a good six months because it was giving me a headache. This past weekend I decided to fight my way through it and began a careful process of comparing, filtering (Vista's great search tools were a lifesaver!), and moving my photos around in preparation for processing using Lightroom. Somewhere along the way, however, I managed to lose a whole day of photos - and it happened to be at the Hawaiian Cultural Center, where I snapped about 500 frames. Not the kind of thing you wanted to lose.

I'd since deleted everything off the NEXTO hard drive, but since it was my original source of all the images, I felt it had the best chance of having the images I needed. So I fired up PhotoRescue 3.0...and remembered that it didn't work with hard drives. I tried a couple of freeware undelete programs I had, but they either lacked file-based filtering, or lacked batch extraction and were designed for file-by-file restoration. I then tried three different commercial programs, two of which found nothing on my NEXTO hard drive. Getting a little desperate at this point, I checked the PhotoRescue Web site and noticed that version 3.1 was released - and it had support for hard drives! I ran it and within minutes it found 8693 images - I restored them all to my local hard drive, did some filtering/sorting, and I have all my missing images back. Like I said, PhotoRescue is a life saver, and very much worth the $29 asking price.

[Jason Dunn]

I don't know if I've written about PhotoRescue before, but if I haven't, here's the scoop: it is, bar none, the best photo recovery tool I've ever used - and now that they've added support for hard drives, it's even more useful. Version 2.0 was great, but a bit complex to use, version 3.0 added a great wizard but lacked the ability to scan anything but a memory card, and now with version 3.1 they've added the missing piece: the ability to target any hard drive and scan it for missing files.



PhotoRescue is one of those tools that you hope you'll never need, but when you do, it's a lifesaver. I was in just such a situation: I went to Hawaii at the end of 2006, and it was my first big vacation with the Nikon D200. I was still experimenting with RAW processing at that point, looking for the best tool for processing. That vacation I shot in RAW + JPEG.

 

I used my NEXTO hard drive to make one copy of the images, and was using Lightroom (then in it's highly unstable 1.0 incarnation) on my laptop to process a second copy of the images. The Fujitsu P7010 I was using didn't have enough CPU power to process RAW images very easily, so I didn't get through more than a fraction of the 1500+ images I ended up shooting. So I had two sets of data, one set partially processed. When I came home I began testing DxO Optics Pro 4, using a third copy of the data (it seemed like a good idea at the time). Then I went back to Lightroom...and back to DxO...and ended up getting a little confused about which data set was which, and abandoned the project for a good six months because it was giving me a headache. This past weekend I decided to fight my way through it and began a careful process of comparing, filtering (Vista's great search tools were a lifesaver!), and moving my photos around in preparation for processing using Lightroom. Somewhere along the way, however, I managed to lose a whole day of photos - and it happened to be at the Hawaiian Cultural Center, where I snapped about 500 frames. Not the kind of thing you wanted to lose.

I'd since deleted everything off the NEXTO hard drive, but since it was my original source of all the images, I felt it had the best chance of having the images I needed. So I fired up PhotoRescue 3.0...and remembered that it didn't work with hard drives. I tried a couple of freeware undelete programs I had, but they either lacked file-based filtering, or lacked batch extraction and were designed for file-by-file restoration. I then tried three different commercial programs, two of which found nothing on my NEXTO hard drive. Getting a little desperate at this point, I checked the PhotoRescue Web site and noticed that version 3.1 was released - and it had support for hard drives! I ran it and within minutes it found 8693 images - I restored them all to my local hard drive, did some filtering/sorting, and I have all my missing images back. Like I said, PhotoRescue is a life saver, and very much worth the $29 asking price.

[djh]

I have used Photo Rescue just once so far and it really is a lifesaver.

A friend thought that the format button on his digicam meant change the size of the image so formatted an SD card with all his family shots for about 6 months. Oh Poo!

So I told him I'd see if I could recover anything and purchased PR to try it out. At first it didn't seem to helpful, could only find about 5 images and came up with a lot of errors.

I took the drastic step of formatting the card again in my PC (nothing to lose right?) and tried again.

Amazing - I was able to recover hundreds of images and a couple of family video files.

One happy friend and I know that if I have a problem with a card in the future all isn't necessarily lost. Life is good!

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by djh

Amazing - I was able to recover hundreds of images and a couple of family video files.

Glad that story had a happy ending!