You need to do this before running PhotoRec. First of all, you must create a directory on your PC’s hard disk where you will store the recovered pictures. Here’s a very quick summary (refer to the instruction on the PhotoRec site). You use the arrow keys to highlight different options, and (generally speaking) Enter to select one of them and advance to the next screen, where new options are presented, until PhotoRec is ready to go to work.īut this makes the process sound harder than it really is. However, if you are expecting a nice friendly Windows dialog, you will be disappointed: PhotoRec runs in the Windows console, and uses an 80s style menu interface. Then, on Windows, you run the photorec_win.exe executable (I haven’t tried it on the Mac). PhotoRec is distributed as a zip file that you simply extract wherever you want (even your desktop, if you are lazy). The downside of PhotoRec is that, well, it is Free Software at its finest 🙂 Let’s just say that user friendliness was not a key design requirement. (Friendly advice: don’t rely on your camera’s “Erase All” function to get rid of embarassing pictures!) Last but not least, it’s multiplatform: it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and even other platforms. In my case, it was able to recover not just all the recent photos my friend was worried about, but also a lot of pictures that had been deleted up to two years ago. Once you point PhotoRec to the drive (hopefully still) containing your photos, and you give it some additional information (see below), you just need to wait while it works its magic. Most of all, it’s quality software that does what it’s supposed to, and does it well. Yes, it’s free-as-in-beer, as well as free-as-in-libre. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Free Software at its finest. If all you need to do is recover photos, PhotoRec is what you want. Actually, PhotoRec is part of a package called TestDisk, which does tons more than just recover deleted files, but requires more user intervention. Well, I found a miracle-worker, and its name is PhotoRec. That was what I expected, actually for this reason, when I asked my friend to leave her supposedly dead or dying SD card with me, I made it clear that, short of miracles, her pictures were probably gone for good. Unfortunately, I had only very limited success with commercial offerings: very few pictures appeared to be recoverable, no matter which software I tried. In this case, I experimented with a few trial versions, which typically show you what’s recoverable but do not actually retrieve the files.
I’m sure they can generally do a good job. There are, of course, several commercial file recovery utilities for both Windows and Mac. If you have never accidentally deleted a file, or accidentally formatted your camera’s memory card, don’t read this post 🙂 Otherwise, here’s something I just found out, trying to help a friend whose SD card had mysteriously formatted itself (don’t ask), thereby nuking about 400 photos.
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