Data Recovery from Camera SD Cards

Lost photos can be traumatic, especially if the photos are irreplaceable. Those photos you took of your once-in-a-lifetime vacation, the pics of your 2-year-old in her first Halloween costume, the poignant last photo you have of your mother—losing those photos isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s heartbreaking. Luckily, data recovery companies can often retrieve data from your camera or its SD card. In fact, if you have the right software, you may be able to recover the data yourself.

Digital cameras make it easy to snap memories so you can save your favorite moments to enjoy again and again. Compact digital cameras, especially entry level point and shoot cameras, often use SD cards to store your photos until you can upload them to your computer. Larger SD cards can hold dozens or even hundreds of photos, depending on the size of the card and the resolution you use. For many people, especially teens, it’s tempting to just leave your photos on your camera card, assuming you’ll always be able to access them. Unfortunately, SD cards can become corrupted, or photos accidentally deleted. Data recovery software can help you retrieve the data if it still exists on the card. Here’s what you should know about data recover options for SD camera cards.

The SD card is a data storage device. Like any other kind of disk or data storage device, it holds your photos in files that are saved on the disk according to a certain file structure. When you delete a picture, the camera doesn’t actually immediately delete the file. It changes the file name so that you can’t access it, and marks the sectors on the disk as available for new data. Even if your computer or camera can’t find your files, there’s a chance that the photos are still there, even if you format the card.

The most important thing to do if you can’t access pictures on your SD card is to remove it from your camera so that you don’t accidentally overwrite the photos that may still be on your card. Download data recovery software to your computer and install it, then insert the card into the SD slot on your PC or laptop. Start the program and follow the instructions on screen after choosing the SD card as the drive containing your data. With any luck, you’ll be able to find and restore your missing photos this way.

If that doesn’t work, though, a professional data recovery service such as Fields Data Recovery may still be able to retrieve your lost photos. Prices vary according to how hard it is to recover the photos or other files from your card, as well as from one data recovery service to another, so shop around to get the best deal possible.

Thumb Drive Data Recovery

Thumb drives have made it amazingly easy to transfer files from your work computer to home, from your home computer to the classroom, from your laptop to the printer—in short, from almost anywhere to almost anywhere else. For example, it’s not unusual for a college student to store all of the work for each of his classes on a thumb drive and simply plug it in to whichever computer is available for him to work. But when that thumb drive fails, it can mean the loss of an entire semester’s worth of work, or worse. Luckily, there are several data recovery options that can help you get your files back if your thumb drive is suddenly inaccessible. In fact, recovering data from a small, portable drive such as a USB drive or a thumb drive is easier in many ways than hard drive data recovery. As long as you have a working computer with Internet access and a free USB port, you should be able to recover the inaccessible files yourself.

First, keep in mind that these steps will only work as long as there is no physical damage to your drive. Data recovery from a damaged thumb drive is more complicated and best left to professionals such as those at Fields Data Recovery. If you can connect the thumb drive and your computer recognizes it, however, chances are that you can use data recovery software to find and access your files.

First, find and download a data recovery program onto your computer. Do not download it to the damaged thumb drive or you’ll risk overwriting the files you’re trying to recover with new data. If that happens, you’ll have lost the files for good. Even a professional won’t be able to access and recover them. There are a number of free data recovery tools available online. While they have superficial differences, most of them follow these steps.

Install the data recovery tool and open it.

Insert your thumb drive into a free USB port.

Select the thumb drive as the drive from which you want to recover data. Click OK or Start.

The program will search the drive for file folders and individual files. Depending on the size of your drive, this part of the data recovery process could take quite a while. As long as you’re working strictly with the files on your computer and not on anything located on the thumb drive, you can use your computer for other things while the program runs.

When the data recovery program indicates that it’s done finding file, open the results. You should see a list of recoverable files from the thumb drive. Tick off the files that you want to recover, indicate the folder where you want to save them—preferably to your hard drive or another thumb drive rather than on the same thumb drive—and click OK or Recover.

If the data recovery software doesn’t do the trick or if your computer doesn’t recognize the drive at all, you may need the help of a professional. Contact the data recovery specialists at Fields Associates to find out about pricing and time frame for your problem.

Data Recovery from Your iPod or Digital Audio Player

If you’ve never thought about data recovery for your personal electronics—you know, music players, ebook readers and the like, maybe you should. Because you carry them around with you, your cell phone, music player and ebook reader are more prone to data loss than your computer. And if you’re like most people, you probably don’t have a backup to restore your data from, which is short-sighted when you consider how many hours you’ve probably spent downloading and arranging your music collection so that you can easily access just the tunes you want to suit your mood.

So what do you do if you turn on your iPod, all set to listen to your favorite Angry Girl playlist, only to have it respond:

“The drive is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?”

If you’re facing this dilemma right now, click no and back out. If you’ve unfortunately already decided that formatting if your only solution, you may still be able to recover the data on your media player’s hard drive using data recovery software. If that fails, a professional data recovery service like Fields Data Recovery may be able to get to files you can’t retrieve using other methods.

Software Data Recovery

As far as your computer is concerned, your media player is just another storage device. There are many software solutions available to attempt data recovery, and some of them will preserve the data structure so that you’ll have little rebuilding to do once you’ve got your files back. There are also a few programs available online, both free and low-cost, which are specifically designed to recover data from your media player or MP3 player. While the specifics vary from program to program, in general, these instructions apply.

Download the software to your PC or laptop.

Plug your MP3 player into the USB port on your computer.

Start the data recovery program and follow the onscreen prompts to choose the device from which you want to recover the files.

If the files show up in the interface, follow the onscreen instructions to select the files you want to restore and undelete them.

Unfortunately, it’s notoriously difficult to recover files from small hard drives, such as those in MP3 players and media players. If your attempt to recover the data doesn’t work on the first try, don’t try again. Instead, find a data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery, that regularly works with small hard drives such as those in your cell phone, camera, media player or music player.

Data Recovery Options for an External Hard Drive

External hard drives have become a more popular method of handling data backups, both for businesses and for home use. For many families, an external hard drive serves as a file storage for the entire family’s needs – photographs, music files, financial plans, school papers and work files from everyone’s computers, all stored on a central external hard drive which everyone can access. So when that hard drive fails, it can be a major problem, not just for one person, but for the entire network that relies on it for backups and for network storage. If you’ve tried to access your external hard drive and found that it’s not available, these steps can help you recover the data from your drive, or protect it so that a professional data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery, can retrieve as much of it as possible.

First, determine whether your hard drive is in good mechanical working order. To do this, connect the hard drive directly to your computer and try to access it through your operating system. Listen for the drive spinning up or for any unusual sounds. If it makes any unusual sounds, including clicking or grinding, detach the hard drive from your computer and consult a professional data recovery service. Running your hard drive when there is a mechanical problem that’s causing scraping or grinding can obliterate data from it by physically damaging sectors on the drive.

If your computer doesn’t recognize the drive and/or it doesn’t spin up, remove the hard drive from its case and manually attach the drive to your PC. Try again to open the hard drive from your operating system. If the computer recognizes the drive this way, and your data appears to be intact, the problem is probably in the hard drive’s power supply. If that’s the case, you should find it fairly easy to transfer the files to another hard drive or to your computer.

Software Data Recovery

If your drive spins up, but the data is inaccessible, you may be able to retrieve the data from it with a software solution, either a purchased one or a free data recovery solution available online. If you choose to attempt your own data recovery, be sure that you follow the software instructions exactly to avoid losing more data. If you’re not confident in your ability to recover the data, outsource the data recovery to a professional data recovery service such as Fields Data Recovery.

If the drive is completely dead, do not attempt to recover the data yourself. A professional data recovery company has the facilities to open your hard drive safely and retrieve the data, so turn to the pros.