Specifications
MediaRECOVER
By Terry Currier
Digital cameras are great, except when you’ve had one
of those oh no moments. Such as oh no I didn’t mean
to erase that picture. MediaRECOVER will help you
recover those images you accidentally deleted from
any media card. If the computer sees the card, the
MediaRECOVER can work it. It can also bring back
les from ash drives. I tested it on a computer with
XP Media Center, and another with Vista. I had no
problems with either operating program.
Once you stick in the media card / ash drive, you
then bring up MediaRECOVER and tell it to scan
the device. If the le you lost is recent, in most cases
it will nd the les you want with the quick scan.
That quick scan by the way is fast only taking a few
minutes. It tells you how many les it found. There is
the option for Image Preview so you can make sure if
it is the right picture you wanted. If it is a ash drive
you are working on it also gives you the option of an
ASCII Preview to insure it is the right document.
The program does not save the le back to the media,
rather to the C:\temp folder. That gives the program a
better chance for the recovery especially if there are a
number of them.
Always remember you want to try and recover a
deleted les as soon as possible to increase your
chance of recovering it. If the images or les are old
(you’ve used the camera or ash drive since) then you
may not nd it right away and have to do a deep scan.
How long that will take depends on how much you
had on it. With a 512MB SD card and lots of pictures
on it took one hour. With a 256MB SD card with not
many past pictures on it took only ve minutes.
Their website says MediaRECOVER can recover over
300 types of les. This includes RAW images from
many cameras, video, and database les. I was even
able to recover a ZIP le successfully.
While it will work on recovering deleted les from
your hard drive. You better hope for a good backup
rst. I did a quick scan and it did not nd some of the
documents I test deleted. So I went for the deep scan,
it said it would take 57 hours to scan my 500GB drive.
Needless to say it stopped it.
I did not have a media card with a corrupt le,
but they say that it can help you repair such
les. There is even an Format Option which
writes new system les to the media. This
allows the card to be read from your computer,
or camera again. It corrects the media when the
camera/PC states that the card is “corrupt, not
initialized or not mounting”.
The Wipe Option overwrites the entire card
with zeros, including the le system areas
completely and securely erasing the data.
Secure Delete allows the user to optionally
install a special feature that enables the secure
deletion of any le from Windows Explorer.
Requirements:
MediaRECOVER 4.0.0.8 requires Microsoft Windows
XP/Vista or Macintosh OS X 10.3.9 or higher
Compatible card reader and sufcient free disk space
for the les being recovered
Note: Some cameras delete images by overwriting the
contents. MediaRECOVER will not be able to recover
those images.
Conclusion
It worked great I had no problems with it. At $29.99 if
you really want that le back have it ready before you
need it.
http://my.smithmicro.com/win/mediarecover/