By Terry Currier
Digital cameras are great, except when you’ve had one of those oh no moments. Such as oh no I didn’t mean to erase that picture. MediaRECOVER will help you recover those images you accidentally deleted from any media card. If the computer sees the card, the MediaRECOVER can work it. It can also bring back files from flash drives. I tested it on a computer with XP Media Center, and another with Vista. I had no problems with either operating program.
Once you stick in the media card / flash drive, you then
bring up MediaRECOVER and tell it to scan the device. If the file you lost is
recent, in most cases it will find the files you want with the quick scan. That
quick scan by the way is fast only taking a few minutes. It tells you how many
files it found. There is the option for Image Preview so you can make sure if
it is the right picture you wanted. If it is a flash drive you are working on
it also gives you the option of an ASCII Preview to insure it is the right
document.
The program does not save the file back to the media, rather to the C:\temp folder. That gives the program a better chance for the recovery especially if there are a number of them.
Always remember you want to try and recover a deleted files as soon as possible to increase your chance of recovering it. If the images or files are old (you’ve used the camera or flash drive since) then you may not find it right away and have to do a deep scan. How long that will take depends on how much you had on it. With a 512MB SD card and lots of pictures on it took one hour. With a 256MB SD card with not many past pictures on it took only five minutes.
Their website says MediaRECOVER can recover over 300 types of files. This includes RAW images from many cameras, video, and database files. Iwas even able to recover a ZIP file successfully.
While it will work on recovering deleted files from your
hard drive. You better hope for a good backup first. I did a quick scan and it
did not find some of the documents I test deleted. So I went for the deep scan,
it said it would take 57 hours to scan my 500GB drive. Needless to say it
stopped it.
I did not have a media card with a corrupt file, but they say that it can help you repair such files. There is even an Format Option which writes new system files to the media. This allows the card to be read from your computer, or camera again. It corrects the media when the camera/PC states that the card is “corrupt, not initialized or not mounting”.
The Wipe Option overwrites the entire card with zeros, including the file system areas completely and securely erasing the data. Secure Delete allows the user to optionally install a special feature that enables the secure deletion of any file from Windows Explorer.
Requirements:
Note: Some cameras delete images by overwriting the contents. MediaRECOVER will not be able to recover those images.
Conclusion
It worked great I had no problems with it. At $29.99 if you really want that file back have it ready before you need it.
http://my.smithmicro.com/win/mediarecover/
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