Is that Once-in-a-Lifetime Photo Gone for Good or is it Possible to Recover Images?
Remember when you shot all of your photos on film? Remember that sinking feeling when you accidentally opened the camera and exposed a roll of film filled with once-in-a-lifetime photos? The digital equivalent of exposed film is when you accidentally hit the delete or reformat button.
It's easier than you think to make this mistake. For example, you may have thought you already downloaded the images to your computer. You might be running low on space and trying to make room for more photos by pruning out the bad shots. Only trouble is, during your cleaning, you might accidentally delete a photo you didn't mean to delete.
Even if you never accidentally delete photos or reformat the media, your digital camera's media is prone to corruption. Swapping media from the camera's simple operating system to a card reader on your computer could lead to problems if you make changes to the files via the computer. For instance, if you insert your media into your computer and use image editing software to alter the image and then save the edited photo back to the media, your camera may not be able to read the new file.
Corruption is also an issue with any storage device including the media that your digital camera uses to store images. Unexpected shutdowns in the middle of a write can cause corruption that affects all of the images on the device.
Exposed film is ruined film. Any images that are exposed to light before processing are doomed. Deleted digital photos don't necessarily have to suffer such a fate. You can recover images due to accidental deletion, accidental formatting, and corruption with the right tools.
Many data recovery software utilities are capable of amazing feats including the ability to recover images from connected devices. If your camera connects to your PC and is read as if it were a logical drive, a general purpose data recovery utility can recover images from it.
In addition, specialized utilities are available specifically to recover images. In fact, many of these utilities are so specific they address a certain file type such as Canon RAW image recovery.
If it seems like magic, it's not. Data recovery is a science that takes advantage of the way file systems store files. File systems use some form of a master index or table that stores the location of each file on the drive. This makes it possible for programs and operating systems to find the files. When a file is deleted, the file itself remains while the record in the master table or index is deleted. For most purposes, the file is inaccessible unless you have data recovery software that goes past the index and retrieves the file itself.
Act quickly if you need to recover images because your files could be overwritten. Do not continue shooting photos with the media that contains your deleted images otherwise you could permanently lose your photos.
