Recover Deleted Files From Your Digital Camera's Memory Card Or Your Computer's Hard Drive

Written by Lynnette on August 9, 2007 | Comments (5)

Have you ever accidentally deleted some photos from your camera's memory card (SmartMedia, Sony Memory Stick, IBM Micro Drive, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital card, or any other common data storage devices for digital cameras)?

We hadn't until yesterday. Jim was on the road. When he's at the races, he sends me a fresh batch of photos to upload to his racer's websites each day. Only, on this day, he accidentally deleted half of the pictures before he actually sent them to me.

And of course, they were the best ones... the photos that people were eagerly waiting to see online!

I did a little research here at home and found a FREE program that saved the day...

How I Found It

Whenever I have a computer question, or want to see which programs "the experts" recommend for various tasks, I run to the website of Steve Bass from PC World.

I've been a "follower" of this computer guru for years.

Steve recommended trying a program called Inspector Smart Recovery.

It's free, it's easy to use, and it brings dozens of file types back to life, including all the standards (JPG, BMP, TIF, and GIF), plus AVI, MOV, and many types of RAW files." -- Steve Bass, PC World

From the website:

Supported photo file types include .jpg, .tif, .bmp, .gif, Canon .crw , Fuji .raf , Olympus .orf (E-XX), Olympus .orf (C5050), Kodak .dcr, Minolta .mrw, Nikon .nef (D1H/D1X), Nikon .nef (E5000/E5700), and Sigma-Foveon .x3f.

Supported video files include .avi and QuickTime .mov.

You can recover audio files in .wav and .dss format.>

I immediately sent this information off to Jim, and he phoned me right away... it worked! Like magic.

Just In Case...

In the event that you need to recover files from your computer's hard drive (rather than a flash drive), then check out this program:

Undelete Plus

It's also FREE and it's also recommended by the folks at PC World:

Run it, and it scans your system for files that have been deleted, even those removed from the Recycle Bin, or deleted on a network drive or via a DOS window. It lists all the files, and tells you whether it can likely be restored. (In some instances, the delete file has already been overwritten; in that case, you can kiss it sayonara.) Then tell the program to restore your files, and they come back from the dead."

...But wait, there's more!

You can recover (almost) anything here.

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5 Comments

Julie said:

This was a life saver! I was using my mom's camera over the weekend and it was acting weird and all the pictures of my 3 kids' first hike were deleted! I was so upset, but now they're all back!

November 3, 2008 7:58 AM | Reply to this Comment

Cath Callaghan said:

i have lost all my photo's of my sister in laws wedding please help

October 11, 2007 2:26 PM | Reply to this Comment

Lynnette said:

Wow... I never realized just HOW popular this photo recovery program would be!

My father-in-law recently returned from vacation in Washington, D.C. only to find that he'd accidentally deleted all 500 pictures that he'd taken on one memory card. (He thinks it happened in the process of switching memory cards.)

He said it took about 2 hours for this program to "find" all of the digital photos. But it worked like a charm! They were all there.

October 11, 2007 4:26 AM | Reply to this Comment

Dean said:

Hi thanks for this info you just saved me alot of heartache after some of my pics from my 2 week holiday i just had got deleted but know there bck safe and sound cheers

August 15, 2007 3:03 AM | Reply to this Comment

Randy said:

Now that is an awesome piece of information on deleted photo files you've provided there. Thanks a bunch!

August 9, 2007 8:38 PM | Reply to this Comment

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