The other day I inadvertently deleted some photos from an SD card before transferring them to the computer. (So I thought, anyway. More about that point later.) Since I knew that there is a plethora of utilities available for dealing with exactly this situation, I did a quick bit of googling and settled on a freebie called Restoration. It’s not terribly pretty to look at but it did the job. Not only did it recover the photos in question, it recovered a bunch of older photos–not that I needed them, but it was still interesting to see them retrieved. Restoration also works on regular hard drives and files; there’s nothing special about how it treats camera cards and photos.
Restoration can be found on Download.com here although that link will probably break sometime in the future. If you go to Download.com and search for “restoration” it shows up on the first page of results.
As it turned out, I didn’t actually lose the photos in the first place. They were where they were supposed to be but a WLAN dropout (or something) briefly obscured them from my view. So my little exercise with Restoration turned out to be unnecessary, but it may serve me well in the future when I really do lose some photos. Maybe this blog entry will help someone else in the same situation.
