Sunday 8 March 2015

Recover images from a damaged SD card

Attempting to recover images from a damaged SD card


Ever had an SD card stop working? Now worried you may have lost all the photos on the card?

A family member recently had hundreds (actually more like thousands) of photos recorded on the card, but the camera stopped recognizing the card.

Inserting the card into a laptop via a USB adapter, Windows didn't recognize it as valid and prompted to format the card. Fortunately they chose not to format it.

What to do?

The good news it is possible in some cases to restore in part or all your photos.There are actually many tools out there, some free, some you'll need to pay for.

The program I used to attempt recovery of the photos is called Zar Data Recovery http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

Zar Data Recovery is a Windows tool and is designed for more than recovering your holiday snaps. It claims it can recover lost files from your laptop/desktop as well, including formatted drives, both external and internal and deleted files stored in FAT32 and NTFS.

The paid for full version gives you everything, but the freebie version gives you the digital image recovery option that we want in this case. The website claims it is possible to recover photos in the following situations:
  • the images were deleted before copying to the PC
  • the card was accidentally formatted
  • some camera failure occurred and the images are not accessible any longer

The Process

Firstly download the setup program from http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

After running the setup start up Zar Recovery.

It's recommended to connect the SD card to your PC with a card reader, rather than via the camera. So I took the recommended approach.

Follow the instructions as provided on the website, but a summary of what you'll need to do is as follows:

After starting Zar Recovery select 'Image Recovery' for the recovery type.




Then select the device the SD card is plugged into. Normally this will be labelled 'USB Reader' or similar, and usually the last drive letter (assuming the card was the last thing plugged into a USB port). In our case it showed as Generic Card Reader and drive letter 'E:'.

Select the drive letter for the card you want to restore from, the click Next to begin the process.




Once the scan is complete you see a list of files for selection to recover. We'll simply select all of them and then click Next.




Choose a destination for the recovered photos and select 'Start Copying'.



Have a look at the recovered photos in the folder you selected above.

In our case we recovered 1895 files, pretty much all the files we suspected were on the disk - so success.

The results will obviously vary depending on what happened to the card, so expect anything from nothing, to getting absolutely everything back.

Now that you hopefully have your photos back, what next? Hopefully you already know the answer - back them up!!


Conclusion

Yes it is possible to recover from what may seem a mini disaster.

Tips to try and avoid this situation:

1. Format the card prior to using it for the first time.

2. Regularly take copies of the photos off your photo card and store somewhere safely. I use multiple backup strategies including physical hard drives and cloud hosted storage. There are a lot sites that allow you store/backup your photos into the cloud. Outlook for example gives you free OneDrive space

3. Once you've backed up your photos, re format the card again before the next photo shoot. I know some people who keep shooting for years without copying off the photos...avoid this if you care about the photos at all.

4. Use good quality cards. The only time I've had troubles is with generic brand memory cards. I now only use Sandisk and have never had an issue.

5. If you're in the middle of a shoot (or maybe on holidays), and have no way to easily copy off your photos, carry a few memory cards with you and swap in a fresh card ever so often. If one fails at least you'll have photos off the other cards.

6. And lastly, look after the card. Store it in it's little plastic container, avoid dropping and leaving it out in the elements

Thanks for reading.

Tom.

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