PShizzy: The Blog

So there you are, in the middle of or after a shoot. You have a small pause in your day, and you decide to start downloading your files. If you’re like me, you let the card download while you go get a snack or attend to something else. You wait for that familiar “ding” sound. Except this time, your download starts off with the “error” sound. It doesn’t kick in just yet. You figure it’s a forgotten setting or you had a hidden window asking you if were you sure you wanted to do what you just tried to do. So you set it up again. Ready to leave the computer to it’s chore, you get the error sound again. It’s starting to kick in: You may have just encountered your first (and unfortunately not last) corrupt card.

You panic, of course. It’s an important shoot. It’s a memorable family gathering. It’s an image of you with Charles Barkley. Whatever it is, it’s lost. You think it’s unfair. You always backup (you do, right?), having two or more copies of a file, offsite (so both copies don’t burn down in a fire or short out in a flood), perhaps online (so that you always have access to it), and in different mediums (DVD so you can’t overwrite a file incorrectly). But how can you backup something that’s corrupt before you even get to a computer? Forget that. How can you at least get back a single copy of all your images? Oh God, what’s it going to cost?

We’ve all read about those companies that will recover your files for you. They often have engineers in bunny suits (cleanroom outfits, not the mall kiosk gig). Those bunny suits ain’t cheap, and neither is the service fee for file recovery on any sort of disk.

So how about FREE, and Mac/PC friendly. Link after the jump.Lexar, a brand name in the memory card business, has a link to their software, Image Rescue 3.0. It’s available for both Mac and PC. Note on the page, it states the following:

Congratulations!
Your card purchase entitles you to a free download of the Lexar Image Rescue 3 software. Simply enter your email and passcode below.

There you have it. You should have purchased a Lexar card. Normally, the software is priced at $30, so if you don’t have a Lexar card, it won’t kill you to spend as little as 21 dollars for an SD card (and for 30 with shipping, you could get a 2gb CF card)

The software is easy to use, and will recover cards (even non Lexar cards). It recovers RAW files for all the majors such as Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Fuji, Pentax, Minolta, and Sigma. It recovers JPG as well as TIF and PNG, and even recovers audio and video files. There are even advanced tools to test, format, and securely erase your cards. For free

Now, as with any recovery software (free, not free, or expensive), recovery is NOT guaranteed. Sometimes you get lucky and get it all back, sometimes you get some of it back. Sometimes nothing. There are different levels and types of corruption. But if you’re in the unfortunate circumstance where you have a card go bad, you have nothing more to lose. I hope you never have to use this software, but we should all have it handy just in case. Personally, I’ve had three card errors in five years, but my friend had twice that many in the last six months. I lost nothing important (two cards failed upon formatting in camera before a shoot, one failed after writing one file, but every other file still worked, without recovery), while my friend, each time, lost portrait images. Each time I was able to recover most of the images, enough that he didn’t have to do a reshoot.

Ok I’ve said enough. Here’s the link:

Lexar Image Rescue 3 – Free Download Offer

I’ll cover backup, synchronization, and different storage types (and services) in the future.

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