Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Poles apart, here are two examples where data recovery may be needed—simple, inadvertent
deletion, and serious data loss through damage to the medium or corruption of
the files stored on it. Most data recovery software is designed to cope with both extremes
and everything in between. As long as the data have not been overwritten, there is a
good chance that you can recover over 90 percent of the “lost” data.
General-purpose data recovery utilities can recover image files as well as other files, but
software developers now offer specialist programs that display thumbnails of the recovered
images so that you can pick and choose which ones you would like to keep. Imagerecovery
software comes with algorithms that are optimized for images, meaning that
they are on the lookout for JPEG, TIFF, and RAW encoding and therefore more likely
than non-specialist programs to succeed in locating the missing data.
Procedure
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Data Recovery
The first rule of any data recovery process is “stop!” You must stop writing data to the
disk, card, or whatever type of media you were using. That obviously includes reformatting
the media in response to a polite invitation that says “This drive is unformatted.
Would you like to format it now?” All is not lost if you do go ahead and reformat,
because some utilities can overcome even this hurdle, but it is best not to write anything
at all on top of the data you want to recover. Equally, you should save recovered files to
a separate physical location.
The first step is to consider whether the drive in question is a system drive or a data
drive. If you have lost images from your main hard disk, which holds the operating system,
you need to shut down the computer, take out the drive, and mount it on another
machine as a data drive. All you need is a screwdriver and calm nerves. Photographers