Jason Dunn
02-19-2008, 05:57 PM
I don't know if I've written about <a href="http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/index.htm" target="_blank">PhotoRescue</a> 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.<br /><br /><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1203432149.usr1.png" alt="" /><br /><br />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.<div style="page-break-after: always;"><span style="display: none;"> </span></div><br />I used my <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/30626/the-nexto-cf-otg-portable-hard-drive-a-photographer-s-best-friend.html" target="_blank">NEXTO hard drive</a> 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 <a href="http://www.dxo.com/intl/photo/dxo_optics_pro/exclusive_features/overview" target="_blank">DxO Optics Pro 4</a>, 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.<br /><br />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, <a href="http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/index.htm" target="_blank">PhotoRescue</a> is a life saver, and very much worth the $29 asking price.