I had a few cases pop up recently where people had either accidentally deleted pictures from their camera's memory cards, or their memory card had become corrupted and unreadable. In either case there is a simple tool that works well to get your pictures back:
PC Inspector Smart Recovery (Click to download)
It runs on Windows and it's very straight forward. Just select the drive letter for your card, leave the format as JPG and choose a destination. Click "Start" and a while later you'll have recovered your pictures!
Here is another trick to keep your memory cards in top working order:
Flash memory is very susceptible to fragmentation, and with use the performance will degrade over time, eventually getting to the point where it will start failing and return errors. This applies to camera memory cards as well as USB flash drives. The fix for this is to pull all the data off of your flash memory device and format it once in a while.
Note that if you are formatting a memory card for your camera it's best to format it from inside your camera. Your camera's manual will tell you how to do this, or if you poke around in the menu system enough you should be able to figure it out. Just be sure to pull all your data off the camera before you do it! (Otherwise you'll need to refer back to the begining of this post where I talk about recovering your deleted pictures...)
One last note about memory cards: They're CHEAP! (If you know where to shop)
If you feel like your camera's memory card is a bit cramped lately, and would like to be able to fit more video onto it, 2GB SD cards are going for about $8 on NewEgg.com (at the time of this posting). They are an excellent online retailer and I stand by them completely. Here are some links to help you find one for your camera:
Secure Digital (SD) (most common)
Compact Flash (CF) (Older cameras and some DSLRs)
Memory Stick Pro Duo (Most newer Sony cameras take this type)
Extreme Digital (xD) (Some Olympus Fuji cameras take this type)
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What an excellent tool to have! Have you ever had luck using it to access files on a flash drive that has issues being recognized by the OS?
ReplyDeleteRegarding formatting flash memory, I do this every time I empty my camera's memory card. I copy the pictures off the card, make sure the copy worked and then immediately reformat the card in the camera. Lest I end up with memory cards sitting around with pictures on them and I don't know if they've been copied off and archived or not.
Say, what method do you use for archiving your digital photographs?
Myself, I have two external hard drives; one lives in a fire safe, the other on the desk in my office. Whenever I empty a memory card or cards, I copy the pictures to a folder named with the date to my computer. I then copy that folder to both external hard drives, returning the one from the fire safe to the safe.
I would actually love to have some sort of always-on file server with RAID on my home network with a separate backup locked up in the safe, but I haven't gotten that far yet...
Good comment, and good questions!
ReplyDeleteThe same company that makes the Smart Recovery tool also makes a more general file recovery tool that works for all types of files on all types of drives. It takes longer than this tool that looks specifically for image files, but it works very well. You can download it here.
As for keeping my photos safe, I have a multi-tiered approach. Just about everything can be replaced in this world except your pictures, so I take it pretty seriously.
I have two external hard drives hanging off my computer; one holds my pictures and documents, and I back them up periodically to the other. I use externals so that if I'm home and a fire breaks out I can yank out either of the drives on the way out the door.
About once every two months I back up to a third drive that I keep in my office at work, so that if I'm not home and a fire happens I will still have that one.
And then about once a year I burn my pics to a DVD and put it in a safety deposit box at my bank (along with all my fabulous diamonds and gold doubloons...)
I used to run a RAID system at home, and I still see it's merits, but it doesn't help in the case of a fire if you're not home.
I've also heard about software that will trade backups over the Internet at night with a trusted friend, which I think is a neat idea, but maybe not 100% convenient.
Hey GuyZero... I just RSS'ed you so I'm catching up. I've had similar success on the Mac side of the world with a little app called CardRaider - saved my bacon more than once...
ReplyDeleteAs for backups... I, too, use the 'extra' hard drive method... one at work, one in a closet somewhere, even one at a friends' in Colorado.
Depending on what you're looking for there are bunch of slick apps like JungleDisk, etc... these have hooks in to Amazon's S3 services. There is a fee, but it's very, very cheap. Costs are seemingly driven towards actual usage. It costs a little bit per month for storage... it costs more for transfer bandwidth. Meaning, if you never pull the data back from S3, that cost is never realized.
At the end of the day, though... hard drives are cheap.