Thursday, August 27, 2009

Question day update final.

Yesterday the final part of question day took place, the formatted memory card, a friend of mine had managed to accidentally wipe the pics off her memory card.
I suspect this happens more frequently than you might think, but most people don't understand how the card actually works and they think they are gone for good.

In a way the cards a bit like a hard drive, when you delete or format a card you don't actually wipe the data off, what you are doing is removing the index that tells the computer whats there and where it is, so it cant see the data. Data recovery software (and there's lots of different ones) looks for the actual data rather than the index, it then re compiles a temporary index so it can "find" the pictures (or whatever) then it usually downloads them to a computer.

Last night I popped the memory card in my card reader, ran the software and Bob's your uncle! 465 recovered photos, the best part of 4 gb worth, there were about 4 corrupted pics, probably caused by overwriting at sometime or other, as the pics go back months, and probably several wipes.

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