Card Rescue saved my bacon

[justpeachy]

I took 1,405 photos on my recent trip to Big Sur and I almost lost all of them. Even though I'd had no trouble with the memory card while taking pictures during the trip, it failed on me while I was downloading the pictures to my computer at home. None of my computers would recognize the card and my camera no longer recognized it either.

So I spent $30 on Card Rescue and after scanning the card twice (the software can see the card even if your computer says it won't recognize it) I was able to save all 1,405 photos. Phew! Needless to say this particular card is going to be destroyed and I already bought a replacement. (By the way, there is a free version you can download to see if the software is able to find any photos to salvage. If it doesn't find anything then you're not out 30 bucks.)

I just wanted to share this with everyone in case this unfortunate incident ever happens to you. Best $30 I ever spent!

[texasbb]

Thanks for the report, JP, many of us are skeptical of those things and it's good to hear a good report from a trustworthy source. You, however, lost a great excuse to go back to Big Sur.

[RobFromRedland]

I had a similar situation several years ago - I purchased a program called PhotoRescue Pro (about the same amount of money), and it worked perfectly.

Glad you were able to recover the photos. That is the downside of digital photography. All it takes is a blip and all your photos are gone!

[markesc]

What kind of memory card? where did you purchase it? how old was it?

I'm having a strange issue with Lightroom where, (regardless of which memory card I use) once the photos are loaded, then "imported" some photos are strangely jumbled, but usually in just a section of the photo (bottom third/right quarter/etc):

I've found a work around by re copying the file from the card back to the drive, and then making Lightroom refresh that file, and it seems to work. Same thing happens on both Lexar and Sandisk, but I suspect the cards are fine, it's just how lighroom sees the raw file? Anyone have a similar situation?

As far as photo recovery, I've read, that even after you "format" the card, you can still recover old photos if and only if you've not taken any new ones past the reformat point.

Glad to hear the $30 and recovery software actually worked!

I took 1,405 photos on my recent trip to Big Sur and I almost lost all of them. Even though I'd had no trouble with the memory card while taking pictures during the trip, it failed on me while I was downloading the pictures to my computer at home. None of my computers would recognize the card and my camera no longer recognized it either.

So I spent $30 on Card Rescue and after scanning the card twice (the software can see the card even if your computer says it won't recognize it) I was able to save all 1,405 photos. Phew! Needless to say this particular card is going to be destroyed and I already bought a replacement. (By the way, there is a free version you can download to see if the software is able to find any photos to salvage. If it doesn't find anything then you're not out 30 bucks.)

I just wanted to share this with everyone in case this unfortunate incident ever happens to you. Best $30 I ever spent!

[justpeachy]

What kind of memory card? where did you purchase it? how old was it?

It was a Kingston 16GB card that I purchased at Fred Meyer on my way out of town for a long trip three years ago. I guess three years is about as long as one can expect such things to last.

As far as photo recovery, I've read, that even after you "format" the card, you can still recover old photos if and only if you've not taken any new ones past the reformat point.

Yes, that has been my experience. In 2007 my sister and I went to the Wallowas. I came home, dumped my card, formatted it, and a few hours later my hard drive crashed (this was back when I still had a Windows computer....never again). I thought I'd just lost all my trip photos, but I found some card recovery software online that was able to retrieve all the trip photos from the card. I had formatted the card but not taken any more pictures yet. The timing was good, I guess. If my hard drive had crashed a few days later I probably WOULD have taken more pictures by then and the trip pictures would have been gone for good.