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Dave's Favorites: Recover Photos from Memory Cards With Photorecovery

Memory cards are a lot like floppy disks. It's possible to accidentally erase a card before transferring your pictures to the PC, for instance. And corrupted data can, on rare occasion, make it impossible to retrieve photos from the card.

To solve those problems, I've been experimenting with Photorecovery, a $40 utility from LC Technology. This simple program promises to recover deleted images, movies, and other data from removable memory cards. It works with the whole gamut of removable media, from SmartMedia and Compact Flash to Memory Stick and Secure Digital cards--you simply insert the funky memory card into a desktop card reader for the program to run its magic on the card's contents.

Photorecovery takes several minutes to scan a card, restoring lost files to a folder on your PC's hard disk as it goes. My results have been fairly positive: Some of the recovered files weren't usable, but the program did a nifty job of restoring many images that I had previously erased. That could be a lifesaver if you accidentally erase a card before transferring your images to the PC. In fact, a friend sent me a card he believed to be corrupt: After he'd filled it with pictures, his PC reported there were no images on board. I ran Photorecovery and got a batch of photos back. My friend was quite grateful.

It's important to remember that if you plan to run Photorecovery on a memory card, do it before you use the card for anything else. As with other types of storage media, adding new data to your card can damage deleted pictures already on the card, lowering the odds that you'll recover anything useful.

What are the odds you'll ever need this program? Pretty low, I suspect. But if you do find yourself with a seemingly damaged memory card, Photorecovery might be worth a try.