How to recover pics from CF card ?

[gtirman]

Hi All,
I am a silly billy!!
In a recent trip to Africa i accidently formatted my memory card containing 400 pics [the first 2 weeks of the trip ]
It was half dark and i was half asleep having just got out of bed when i did the bad deed... then one minute later a lion came into close proximity and i got approx 20 shots away on the same card.
I am told all is not lost and i may be able to recover the lost pics.....can someone point me in the right direction on how please.
The card is a Sandisk Ultra 11 Compact Flash 15mb/s 4GB.
Camera was a Canon 40D if that helps?

Cheers for any tips

John

[kiffy]

i dont know much about compact flash cards as my only recovery experience was with an sd card for a friend some time ago and i was fortunate enough to recover quite a few... depending on several factors you 'may' be able to recover some photos. you wont be able to recover all as your 20 new shots recorded over the sectors that the original photos occupied so they sadly are not recoverable. wether you can recover more depends on how recently the card was formzatted. if its not been done for some time then theres a chance the lost photos had been fragmented and portions of their data was on the part of the card that you recorded the new photos on. to recover the photos i did i used a piece of software i got free after a google search, i cant remember the name right now but i believe i may have it installed on my pc at work so ill post here later. other than that try googling it

[gtirman]

Thanks for that Kiffy.
Yes, i have Googled and got one trillion sites that could possibly be used for the purpose however i thought i would ask first for peoples first hand information on what has worked and what hasnt.
I may only get one shot at it so i want to be 100% sure that i have a reasonable chance of recovery.

Appreciate your reply as it has given me hope....if you get the site that worked for you that would be great too !!

[kiffy]

just dont use the card again until you have gone through all the things you can to recover them, as every photo taken is one or more less that you may be able to save

[kiffy]

justgot to work (comutes great living just 1/3 mile away) and sadly its not on my computer here. hopefully somone else will have a name for you... sorry

[silversnapper1]

I understand this software is good although fotunately, I have never had the need to use it so cannot vouch for it.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

Steve.

[hssutton]

I would also recommend Zero Assumption.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/


Harry

[ap4a]

Free: PC Inspector File Recovery: http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1
Alternatively Piriform Recuva: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Or if you want to pay for software, Sandisk recommend (and bundle with some of their cards) LC Tech Rescue Pro and Rescue Pro Deluxe: http://www.lc-tech.com/buynow/rescueprobuynow.html

[OldBoy]

Yes, Zero Assumption Recovery or Zar as it's also known, is the best recovery software on the market, and it's free for photo recovery. When you delete a file or format a card/disk all you are doing is altering or deleting the FAT file, and not removing the actual data. As cards write data differently from harddrives, you should be able to recover all the photos except the twenty overwritten by the new photos. In theory, you could recover these twenty also, but it requires special software and costs a lot of money.

Don't be concerned if it takes a long time, about two hours for 4gb card, as it has to rebuild the FAT file, so you can access the photos again. I had to recovery 400gb of photos from a hard disk and it took five days on a quad core computer.

[gtirman]

I'll give ZAR a try. [Sansdisk now require $20USD for what was a free service previously ]
One last question.....is there any way of losing the pics or is it pretty much foolproof with good prompts etc?
cheers to all replied and it seems like all agree on ZAR