Using Data Recovery Software

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Yesterday I formatted an SD card in error. That is, I intended to format the card but I forgot that there were some photos on the card that I wanted to keep.

I used disk recovery software, and I was able to recover the Fuji RAW images.

OK, nothing newsworthy in that.

But what is perhaps of interest is that the recovery software recovered a whole host of images I had deleted, some going back to 2017.

When I say ‘deleted’ I mean photos that I either deleted when they were in the camera, or that were deleted when I formatted the card in the camera at some point in the past.

I read that recovery software cannot recover whatever was in the space on the card that has since been overwritten. In my case however, most of the card had not been overwritten. That’s because I don’t take that many shots before I delete them after downloading.

I rarely get very far into the available space in a card before I delete some images, or format the card.

Still, it surprised me that the images were still recoverable. If you are in the habit of throwing away or giving away your old SD cards or Compact Flash cards, you might want to think about hitting the cards with a hammer or cutting them up before disposing of them.

The photograph above is a shot I took when Tamara and I travelled across Andalusia in 2017, It’s a photo of people attending a talk in the Mezquita in Cordoba. I shot it with my Fuji X100s that I recently swapped for an X-E3 and a 27mm lens.

Of course, I kept most of the photos from that trip, but there are some that I deleted – and this is one of them. So it’s a nice bonus to recover old photos that I had forgotten I ever took.

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