I was having a great weekend with my Family. I'm happily snapping pictures of everyone enjoying the lake. Then, I looked down to see "Memory Card Error" on the screen of my camera! So I took the card out and put it in a computer where it said the card needed to be formatted before I could use it. I said "No" to that and put the card away until I got home.
I own R-Studio data recovery software that I have used several times to recover deleted files. I ran it against the SD card but everything it recovered was corrupt. So I started searching for other data recovery software. I downloaded several different programs. Many did nothing because it couldn't find the file allocation table. One, Stellar Phoenix, was able to see all of my pictures but it required payment before it would recover them. I wasn't sure I was willing to pay $39.95 for a few weekend photos. So I continued searching. Then I found ZAR. ZAR stands for Zero Assumption Recovery. ZAR allows photo recovery with their free version. I ran it and it took a while but it successfully recovered all but two of my pictures. Those two were corrupted. The videos that it recovered were corrupt but that's ok. In the end, I got my pictures back and I didn't have to pay to do it!
Leave a comment