GranthamTech

How I Recovered My Lost Digital Photos June 17, 2009

I managed to spend nearly 40 years working in IT without once losing data. I was careful – some might say obsessionally careful – to make sure I always had backups and a recovery plan. Sadly, however, when it came to the simple matter of managing the photos on my own digital camera I failed to take that same care and ended up losing scores of photos that I had taken during a recent holiday.

It happened like this.

Having received a memory card as a birthday present I was keen to upgrade the storage capacity of my camera as soon as possible. So I inserted the card and followed the instructions to format it without first making sure that all the photos on the existing built-in memory had been saved.

Very careless of me.

Removing the new memory card quickly established that my holiday pics that should have still been on the built-in memory were gone. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued of course, together with a strange sense of guilt that echoed the fact that it was nobody’s fault but my own.

So what to do. Was there any way at all that the photos could have survived a “format” operation? Well maybe. On a FAT filesystem, as used by my camera, a “delete” is often nothing more than the removal of directory information pointing to the file. The actual data is left untouched.

Maybe this was also true for a “format” operation. If so the photos would still be there on the internal memory and there might be at least a chance that I could find some kind of “undelete” program that would recover my lost pics.

Enter PhotoRec and TestDisk. These 2 wonderful utilities are free and open source and will run under Linux, Windows, Mac and other platforms. TestDisk is a utility that can be used to recover lost partitions, lost boot sectors and damaged filesystems generally. It’s companion utility, PhotoRec, as it’s name suggests, is a program that can recover lost photos, video (and other filetypes) by attempting to read the data still present on the media.

So for those of you who, like me, have been careless enough to have lost data from portable media (such as a digital camera) here are the steps I went through to recover them -

1. Download the TestDisk and PhotoRec programs. On Ubuntu Linux this can be done with this one command -

sudo apt-get install testdisk 

(Go here to download for other platforms).

2. Connect the media device to the PC and note the mount point (e.g. /dev/sdb1)

3. Open up a terminal and enter the following command -

sudo photorec   /d rec_folder  /dev/sdb1 

where rec_folder is a writeable folder on the PC to receive the recovered files (PhotoRec will create it and, for some reason, append .1 to the name)

4. This screenshot shows that PhotoRec has identified the media device – press Enter to Proceed.

5. This screenshot shows various partition table types that PhotoRec knows about – use the Up-Arrow key to select “Intel/PC partition”.

6. Press Enter To Select (Whole disk).

7. This screenshot shows various filesystem types that PhotoRec knows about – select Other for FAT filesystems.

8. This screenshot shows file recovery in progress.

9. The final screenshot shows all files recovered – operation is complete.

To give PhotoRec the best chance to recover your data use it as soon as possible after deletion or formatting. Using the affected storage before recovering the lost files may cause permanent data loss.