A couple weeks ago we went to the zoo and took our Cannon Digital XLR camera along as we always do in order to capture pictures of our kids.  However, after a full morning of taking pictures we got home and were going to load them on the Mac when we got a lovely message that the camera card needed to be reformatted and no pictures were found…

WHAT!?

I was sure that was a mistake, so we plugged it into a few other machines but each one said the same thing. For my family we love to take pictures and have been doing it for a long time.  About 8 years ago we went to Peru for vacation and took 100+ pictures a day for each of the 14 days we were there.  So after realizing that the Card was “Really” not working right I started looking for any type of software that could help recover our pictures from the day.

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Let’s just say if you want to check and see if you have a chance of recovering anything you can easily do a quick Google search and find a lot of trial software.  I ended up installing a few of them from companies that I felt I could trust.  The nice thing about most of the trial software is that you could run the SD Card recovery and get a preview of the photos it found before you had to purchase the full version.  In the end we bought the eSupport.com product called Undelete Plus and were able to get all of the photos back from that day.  In reality this seemed like a lot of the other products but I liked that this one can restore more than just pictures and videos like the other two I was reviewing.

Update: After this issue happened we decided to use our old CF Camera card we purchased at the same time as our camera.  Also, we just got back from a 2 week vacation of taking pictures with no issues.  I think in looking back the issue relied in the CF Card Adapter as we had previously tried to replace the SD card.

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