Digital Image Recovery: PhotoRescue
Well, I owe a plug, here . . . and a reminder note for myself if this happens again!
My third Canon camera has suffered a death comparable to my second Canon camera. So, I ordered myself a Christmas present today: a Fujifilm FinePix F30 — should be here Wednesday!
Anyway, one thing my second Canon camera did for a very long time was to EAT pictures I had taken. I tried multiple cards but they would just randomly get corrupted in the camera, and Canon went to great lengths to presume that the problem was with me, and not with their camera. (They got sued for doing that–yay class actions!) I am still bugged that I lost pictures of Clapham Junction and of the Eiffel Tower! Grr! Anyway, when I got to Thailand I slowed down enough to find a work-around to the problem of my second Canon: PhotoRescue!
Once I found PhotoRescue, I found my second Canon fairly tolerable: if a card did go bad, I would swap it out, and the next time I offloaded pictures, I would run the CF card through PhotoRescue and get most of my image data back! Crap Canon, but great recovery!
After my second Canon died, I did my research and reluctantly bought another Canon because I couldn’t find a good non-Canon alternative. You might gather, I’m willing to give the Fujifilm a chance–the one I bought for Yayoi last year was pretty neat. My third Canon did not have the recurring data corruption problem, so for some years, and some computers, I had no cause to use PhotoRescue, and I forgot its name.
Alas, along the way to its recent death, my third Canon corrupted the data on its card, and precious photographs or relatives I had not seen since I was on my second Canon got eaten! Nooooo! Not again!!
But I recalled that I had gotten out of this jam before. I poked around on the Internet and downloaded a few of the dozens of “rescue corrupt images from your awful digital camera” software programs, but oddly, none of them worked! Desperate, I dug around in my e-mail archives for late 2002, and found the receipt for PhotoRescue. I downloaded a copy and it found my data on the CF card where others had failed! I was so glad I had no problem paying the $30 registration a second time!
Responses
-berto
Yeah, Canon cameras are *VERY* picky about the type of of CF card used. I became aquainted with this when my EOS Rebel ate the photos on my 1GB Lexar card. I researched online and found out that Canon’s methods of saving pictures to the CF in the EOS line have trouble with the CF data instructions that Lexar (and others, usually rebranded/white label CF cards that use Lexar’s procedures). A fix is being worked on by both companies, but consumers are usually SOL and out of both pictures and flash card if they encounter that problem. I still have the CF card and I will give PhotoRescue a shot to see if I can recover the pictures. I like Canons and will probably stick with their products as long as they meet my expectations- (Canon FX (retired), Sureshot (model unkown, acquired in 1989, gave to a friend a few years back who still uses it), EOS 630 (occasionally used for 35mm B&W), S30 (dropped, retired and missed), S70, EOS XT).
Ben
Probably too late now for you, but if you buy Lexar’s Pro memory cards, they come with one of the rescue programs (I think theirs is ImageRescue) for free on the card. Copy off to your machine, and you’re set.
*knocking on wood* Never had to use it on my Nikons, though (CP995 and D70s). Nikon’s choosy about their cards, too. They’ll guarantee performance if you use either Lexar or Sandisk cards, but that’s it.
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Tiny Print:
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