Useful and easy memory card recovery tips for Beginners
Posted by admin on July 5th, 2010Data loss from a memory card can be devastating for a photographer. It can spoil his career if he ends up losing important photos or videos. Similarly, a data loss situation can give you sleepless nights as you might lose some cherished photos unexpectedly. The above situations can erupt or surface when the memory card of your digital camera or any other host device gives up on you. You can lose valuable data on account of many instances including memory card corruption, accidental deletion of data, virus attack, unintentional formatting and others.
Though, you can recover lost data - irrespective of the file type - from a backup, there are less chances of absolute and successful recovery. In such situations, before opting for a third-party memory card recovery software, you can take into consideration the following steps:
Do not use the card for any purpose
It is recommended that you should immediately stop using the memory card after discovering that you have encountered a data loss. If you do not use the card after a data loss event, you in a way bolster the chances of memory card data recovery. Therefore, do not store new photos or videos onto the card.
When a file is deleted from the card, its index entry gets deleted from the file system while the data remains 100 per cent intact. The data (of the deleted file) remains secure until a new file overwrites it. If data doesn’t get overwritten, you can recover all lost files.
In fact be extra cautious, and lock the card using write-protect switch. As long as the switch is in lock position (as with SD and other cards), no new data can be written onto the card.
Clean dust particles, if any
On few occasions, a camera or computer doesn’t recognize the card. It could happen due to the presence of dust particles on the receptacles of your memory card, Therefore, clean the memory card’s receptacles with a soft and dry cloth, and re-insert it again. It might work.
Check your camera thoroughly
If you do not view pictures in your digital camera, which should have been on its memory card, check your camera’s internal memory. You might find your pictures there. You can also copy the pictures from the internal memory of the camera to the memory card.
Data recovery
If everything else fails and you do not recover the lost or deleted data from the memory card, download a reliable memory card recovery software from the Web. But, make sure to download a read-only software.
Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a user-friendly software which recovers lost or deleted photos and other multimedia files from a range of storage media including digital cameras, hard drives, memory sticks, USBs and others. This memory card data recovery utility is available for both Windows and Mac users.