After almost 9 years of digital photography, I finally did it - accidentally formatted a CF card before copying images to my HD. There were a few dozen images taken on the day of my stupidity which I badly wanted to save.

The DPreview Search function came to my rescue. Apparently there are quite a few programs which will rescue files and folders, but (apparently) not all of them can rescue RAW files. I chose the program Photo Rescue from DataRescue.com http://www.datarescue.com/

I'm very pleased and surprised to say that even the free demo version allowed me to see all my formatted files.The demo doesn't allow you to save the recovered images, so of course I purchased the program - $29.95 USD. All but two CR2 files, and all of the JEPGS and TIFFs were salvaged! One of the two RAWs which wasn't recovered is an old one which had already been copied to my HD. The other is one which I probably wouldn't have saved anyway. So I am delighted with Photo Rescue.

The one drawback to recovering lost files like this is that in addition to the files I wanted to recover, of course I got hundreds of much older image files which still existed in ghost form on the CF card after previous in-camera formats. That's okay - it will take me only ~ 30 minutes some day to select out those few dozen images I need to keep.

Finally, one small hint - depending on your computer's setup, do not save recovered pictures (or any other pictures, IMO) to the Windows "My Pictures" folder (which I hate anyway). Instead, create a new folder on your HD and save to that.

Bill Hansen

Bill Hansen