On a Whale watch cruise with the kids and the significant other and snapping away with my Canon. I go to review the pics and there gone!?!?!


I am sure they are probably still there I didn't format it or anything but what am I to do?

Isn't there software for data recovery or something?
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You can try this, I have had great luck and it is free! :-)

http://www.piriform.com/recuva
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Great link.
Thanks.
Will share with son who recently had the same problem.
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Not trying to sound smart, but was the SD card fully inserted in the camera? I have snapped away like that and found the card empty, but the pics were on the camera's internal storage.

Just a thought...
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If that doesn't work, I have a program I downloaded and paid for that came from the website http://the-undelete.com/. They call it D-Photo Recovery.

My memory card crapped out on me with over 1,000 photos on it. This was from an all day trip to the zoo. I was able to recovery EVERYTHING. It was well worth the $50 it cost me.

I also liked that, for the free downloaded version, it would display thumbnail images to show me what pictures it could recover. Few things suck worse than paying for a software that won't deliver as promised.
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I've been told that you are supposed to format your card in the camera each time you put the card in. Might be over kill, but it's supposed to avoid the problem you are having.
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agree, check the camera's hard drive.
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I don't think that is really going to do anything besides confirm that the connector is making good contact. But, it really won't hurt anything either.
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Great link and it was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunatetly it didn't work :-) any other ideas??
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If the chip failed, then you might be sol.

You could try contacting a professional recovery service.
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I could contact one of our electronic forensic vendors for a quote if you're interested.
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Is it cold? I mean like really quite cold? That can have an effect on the card (mainly the power unit inside, yes there is a battery in there) that will stop it from saving/displaying photos.
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There just family photo's but were some good ones I thought too. I am just going concentrate on new better photographs. Many thanks to those that helped, what great bunch of BOTLS!
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Buy a new memory card first.

Don't give the existing one a second chance to fail on you.
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:-)

SD cards are flash ram...
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And then back-up the pictures on your home computer (or another type of hard drive).
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When my card failed, my computer wouldn't recognize the card in the reader. I had to format it in the camera first (scared that I would lose everything) but the program I recommended above recovered every single photo. Even ones that were MONTHS old that I thought were long gone. But the hundreds of photos from my zoo day were all saved.
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Question, after you 'lost' the pictures...did you take anymore pictures?

If you did your SOL.

Once you write over the files they are gone. When they get deleted or formated, the files are there and can be recovered. If you write over them by taking more new pictures, you would need data forensics to recover them and that cost BIG bucks.
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I did but not after I realized the older ones were gone. It was a 16g card and yes I am going to return it. It's only about 4 month old or so. Luckily I saved all the pics on it the day before so not much was lost.

It's funny but after I tried to retrieve the pics it shows the pictures and I have 5 mgb of data (for each of the pics appx) but the picture doesn't open. Strange.
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Kenstogie, if you trust me to mail me the card I can try to recover the pics using my software, then burn it to DVD's and mail them back to you. It'll save you $50. Let me know.
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