pics deleted from memory card - recovery program advice?

[philcray]

Hi

I am no photography expert and have a standard Samsung point and shoot 10M digital camera which has always been fine for my needs.

I have had it about 7 years and, at the weekend, was just going through and deleting a few photos when the camera shut down and, on restart, infomed me that no pictures were stored...

Looking via google, there seem to be a few programs you can download which will supposedly locate the "deleted" pictures - I am a bit wary of just downloading anything and wondered if anyone had experience of such things or could recommend a solution?

Many thanks

Phil

[andy-xr]

Check out Zero Assumption Recovery

[Magic919]

Don't panic. It's cheap, rather than free.

[NWMark]

"Recuva" works well for simple file retrieval ive used it a few times now.

[Comacchio]

Disk Digger is fairly decent. Has worked for me in the past. So you have plenty of options!

[philcray]

Thanks, that's the information I was hoping to get!

I will give it a go and let you know how I get on.

Thanks again

Phil

[philcray]

Just a quick question, is there anything in particular it would be useful to know before downloading any of these, or any information it would be handy to have to hand (as well as not being a photography expert, I am also not much of a technology expert....!)

[andy-xr]

philcray said:

is there anything in particular it would be useful to know before downloading any of these

Take backups in future

I dont think any of these are destructive, it'd be worth checking out the release notes on them though

[Olivero]

Let me know if the programmes mentioned don't work. Our software is much more powerful and can recover very badly damaged cards.

http://rocketnewyork.com/digitalrescue

[ian in lancs]

NWMark said:

"Recuva" works well for simple file retrieval ive used it a few times now.

x2

[philcray]

Thanks again for all the advice!

I tried Recuva but it only recovered 1 photo, not sure why it selected that 1 image.

Then tried Disk Digger which seemed to find all the pictures but would only display a few of them, the rest were just shown as icons.

Then I tried Zero Assumption Recovery which seemed to work the best, found quite a lot of photos (not the most recent ones unfortunately) - I saved these to my PC.

One more question - some of these pictures look fine when viewed at thumbnail size but, when opened, have been corrupted and have bits of other pictures on them. Also, some of the thumbnails will not open even though you can see the image?

Any thoughts on this gratefully received!

Finally, I presume the memeory card is corrupted and I should buy a new one?

[Comacchio]

Before buying a new one - format it. That (I would think) would solve any corruption issues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV1u-x6XhuM

[marshalla]

OP - if you're really stuck and keen to get the photos back, email me (see profile for the reason why).

[LongQ]

Comacchio said:

Before buying a new one - format it. That (I would think) would solve any corruption issues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV1u-x6XhuM

Yup.

But then again if the card is as old as the camera (though I would be surprised if it was as old as indicated earlier in the thread) there may be advantages to buying a new card since a greater capacity original style SD card is likely to be available for hardly any cash at all if one avoids high street retailers. Perhaps not very much anyway even of one uses highstreet retailers.

[philcray]

Thanks, I bought the camera in early 2003 so it is about 8 years old with the original card - been fine up until now....!

One odd thing, I have managed to recover and save a number of the photos which look perfect as thumbprints but, when opened, are corrupted and have parts of other photos on them or do not show an image at all, or only a small part of the image?

Any ideas on why this and, ideally, how to fix?!!

[marshalla]

philcray said:

Thanks, I bought the camera in early 2003 so it is about 8 years old with the original card - been fine up until now....!

One odd thing, I have managed to recover and save a number of the photos which look perfect as thumbprints but, when opened, are corrupted and have parts of other photos on them or do not show an image at all, or only a small part of the image?

Any ideas on why this and, ideally, how to fix?!!

It depends on the image format. Some effectively contain a thumbnail as well as the full image so if damage occurs to the file the thumbnail can be retrieved while the full image is corrupted.

It sounds like you have some cross-linkage or overwriting going on.

[Ed_P]

Comacchio said:

Before buying a new one - format it. That (I would think) would solve any corruption issues.

Good advice. It's generally recommended that formatting is the preferred option to "delete all" once you've copied off the files. I always do this and have never had this sort of problem.

[LongQ]

philcray said:

Thanks, I bought the camera in early 2003 so it is about 8 years old with the original card - been fine up until now....!

One odd thing, I have managed to recover and save a number of the photos which look perfect as thumbprints but, when opened, are corrupted and have parts of other photos on them or do not show an image at all, or only a small part of the image?

Any ideas on why this and, ideally, how to fix?!!

Ah, I may have assumed that "10M" referred to 10 Megapixels - which would be unlikely back in I think. Presumably it's a model number?

Files are not stored as files like a printed image would be. Tey are blobs of data often scattered around in the storage media and brought together when required for display/copying/etc. There will be a similalry stored blob of information that acts as an index to an image and otheres that act as indexes to the indexes to tell whatever systems needs to know where to go and look for the blobs.

If an index 'goes bad' for some reason - and they to quite often without there being a physical fault with the memory media as such - all sort of strange things can arise.

Over the years I have had 2 or 3 hard disks that have had a similar problem whereby the 'boot sector' index has a damaged reference block of data that prevents the drive booting a computer. Almost impossible to work out how to correct it but the drive works fine as a slave unit. So I have upgrades to a new drive and kept the original as a secondary drive or backup. Since doing this usually gained a lot of additional storage the old drive was often little used.

I could have re-formatted and carried on but the capacity gain for little cost suggested a new drive was a better route.

It's the same with memory cards but if you buy a new one for a few quid do make sure it is compatible with the camera. The lastest high capacity cards will probably not be compatible. (I'm assuming it uses an SD card.)

[philcray]

Thanks again for the feedback - it is a 10m camera but I double checked and actually bought it in 2006 so my mistake!

As mentioned, the thumbnails look fine but on opening them the results vary - from the picture appearing fine to only a small portion appearing to it having parts of other photos mixed in with it to no image being there at all.

I (seem to!) understand that the thumbnail is stored differently so is not just a smaller version of the stored image - but is there anything else I can do to get the images back correctly?

[marshalla]

marshalla said:

OP - if you're really stuck and keen to get the photos back, email me (see profile for the reason why).