The Tenuous Link

I just realized that I had deleted a couple of photos from my telephone that I should have kept. In the days before the recycle bin, DOS provided the undelete command, but that doesn't seem to be part of Windows XP or Vista. It would have been quite tedious restoring all of the 100 or so other files so that I could look at them to find the one photo that I wanted to restore, but obviously there are plenty of utilities available to recover accidentally deleted files. I'm sure there still are some free tools available to do this (almost certainly for Linux), but I settled for cheap, on the condition that I was also paying for easy to use.

The two options I tried were

Data Doctor Recovery Memory Card $69

Too expensive, auto detection didn't work out that my memory card was FAT16, but advanced recovery options let me specify that, and then it found my deleted files. It also offered NTFS as a file system option. That's maybe useful to someone, but I don't think that there are any cameras that use NTFS.

Photo Rescue Version 3 $29.95

I didn't see any mention of NTFS in this program, but it detected my FAT16 formatted card properly, founded my deleted files, and then started showing me thumbnails of them. The price was just low enough for me not to bother thinking about any other options.

// posted by Steven @ 8:38 PM