6 data recovery tools for SD cards, USB

drives and more

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2501547/data-storage-solutions/datastorage-solutions-6-data-recovery-tools-for-sd-cards-usb-drives-andmore.html
Review: 7 data recovery tools for every data disaster

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Image gallery: 6 data recovery tools for SD cards, USB drives and

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Have a damaged USB thumb drive or memory card?

These applications can help you save your data.

By Serdar Yegulalp
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Computerworld | Mar 5, 2012 6:00 AM PT
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As USB thumb drives and memory cards get larger and cheaper, it's getting easier to
trust much more of your data to them. It's also much easier to mistakenly erase data
or have them hiccup on you. And if you're in the habit of holding on to that data for
too long -- for example, not transferring photos from your camera's memory card -disaster is almost guaranteed to strike at some point. What happens then?

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While there's no end of data recovery software packages out there, most of them are
primarily designed to reclaim data from system drives. In this roundup, I look at the
following six packages in terms of how well they recover data from mobile storage
such as flash drives and memory cards: CardRecovery, PhotoRec, Recover My Files,
Recuva, Remo Recover and Undelete 360.
[ Further reading: Drones in the enterprise: The future of data collection ]
Mobile storage devices can pose their own challenges for data recovery tools. A
damaged device with no proper partition data might not mount correctly, making it
impossible to use with tools that require a drive letter. Memory cards used in cameras
can have data stored on them in oddball formats, such asCanon's CR2 raw-image
format, a custom variant of the TIF format.

How we tested
For testing, I used two storage devices: a Transcend 8GB SDHC card (Class 6)and
an 8GB Kingston DataTraveler flash drive. Both were formatted as FAT32 and loaded
with 5.8GB of files, a mixture of image files in multiple formats (JPG, GIF, PNG,
Photoshop), audio files (variable bit-rate MP3), MicrosoftOffice documents, ZIP
archives and PDF files.
I tested them using the Windows versions of these recovery apps. (Some of these
products also offer versions for other platforms, which I didn't test; these are noted at
the top of each review.) Tests involved selectively erasing and recovering files, and

attempting to recover all files after a quick format (one where only the directory
information is erased, not each block on the disk).
[[Note: Because this article was written in 2012, some of the information may be
outdated. However, as of February 2015, all prices are current and all reviewed
software is still available.]]

CardRecovery
WinRecovery Software
Price: $39.95
OS: Windows 98 and later. (CardRescue available for Mac OS X)
CardRecovery is the most focused of the applications reviewed here: It exists mainly
to recover files from memory cards used in cameras. The only file types it works with
are JPG and RAW-format image files, and video and audio files (e.g., AVI, MPG,
MOV, MP3, WAV). It will not search for documents, archive formats, some image
formats (such as Photoshop or PNG) and other day-to-day file types.

CardRecovery
Click to view larger image.
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On the plus side, CardRecovery offered the best detection of CR2 files I found. In
addition, its wizard interface made the recovery process quite easy. To begin a scan,
just enter a drive letter, a camera brand (optional) and/or a file type (also optional),
and a destination folder in which to save the recovered files.
The results of the scan are shown incrementally, although there's no preview mode
during the scan, which makes it harder to tell if a given file is in fact what you're
looking for without stopping the scan. A full scan of each of my 8GB devices took just
under 10 minutes.
Once the scan's complete, you can preview JPGs (but only JPGs) and the program
window can't be resized, so you can't ever see more than six thumbnails on the
screen at once. This makes it a little harder to deal with RAW-format files, especially
since file names aren't recovered: It might be easier to just recover everything and
sort it out later.
Because CardRecovery can only work with devices that have a drive letter, it may not
be of much use if you're dealing with a card whose partition information is damaged
and therefore can't be assigned a drive letter. (PhotoRec, in contrast, can work with
any device even if there's no partition data.)
CardRecovery offers a free trial version that will scan media and find lost files, but
you must buy the full version to recover them.
Bottom line
If quickly recovering data from cameras is a priority, CardRecovery might be well
worth the $40. Since the trial version allows you to preview recovered files, you can
try that first to see if it suits your needs.

Best practices for recovering data from mobile drives

Restoring data from USB drives and memory sticks comes with some of the same
caveats as any other data-restoration effort. Here are a few useful tips:
Use write protection. To prevent further accidental destruction of data, mobile
storage devices should be mounted as read-only whenever possible before you
attempt any recovery operations. SD cards typically have a write-protect switch,
which makes it easier to protect them before attempting a recovery operation.
Removable USB drives are a stickier wicket, since Windows does not have a way to
manually mount their file systems as read-only. There is a Registry setting that works
with Windows XP SP2 and higher; it forces all USB mass-storage devices into readonly mode. (Note that any program that expects the device being recovered to be
writable, such as Remo Recover, may balk at this.)

Be patient. If you're using a program that supports deep scanning at the cost of a
slower recovery process, use it. The speed of this type of scan depends on your
system's CPU rather than its I/O, as most of the work involves matching file
signatures and checking for false positives. If you're in a hurry, run a deep scan using
the fastest machine you have access to.
Remember to use the "Safely Unplug Hardware" option. Memory cards and
sticks generally tolerate immediate removal, but do yourself a favor and remember to
safely eject these devices before removing them, just to be sure. This cuts down on
the possibility that data will be lost in the first place.
Page 2 of 4

PhotoRec
Christophe Grenier
Price: Free
OS: DOS, Windows 98 and later, Mac OS X, Linux (2.4 /2.6 kernel)
In some ways, PhotoRec is the most powerful application in this review. It can recover
files from almost any device -- whether or not it's mounted with a drive letter, has a
partition or is even formatted. PhotoRec has editions for multiple platforms: Windows,
Linux and Mac OS X. And its creator claims it can detect and recover more than 390
types of files, and not just photos, as the name might imply. However, its very Spartan
interface may be off-putting to users who expect a slick graphic interface.

PhotoRec
Click to view larger image.

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When you launch PhotoRec, you're given a list of all the available storage devices in
the system: hard drives, attached removable drives or loaded card bays -- but not
networked drives. Choose a device and a partition, set your search options (the
defaults work fine for basic recovery), pick a place to save the recovered files to and
the rest is pretty automatic.
A recovery pass can be halted and resumed later if need be, especially if the time
estimate for recovery (which is gratifyingly accurate) runs into hours. A full scan of
each of my 8GB devices only took about 10 minutes, although the "unformat" option
(see below) easily doubled that.
Recovery searches can be performed on either the space marked as free or on the
entire drive, regardless of what files already exist. One feature that goes hand in
hand with this is the "unformat" function, which analyzes the entire drive for file
system structures instead of simply looking block-by-block for valid files. This is useful
if you want to recover directories instead of just files (although for the most part I was
happy just to get the files back).
It's even possible to recover from a device whose partitions have been damaged or
which has bad directory information. You can also add your owncustom file types to
the program if you're looking for files that aren't in PhotoRec's dictionary of
signatures.
PhotoRec restored everything I was looking for, although file names weren't
recovered and CR2 files weren't saved unless I enabled an expert option to save
"broken" files (possibly because they were seen as damaged TIF files). Also, even
though PhotoRec runs on Windows, don't expect a GUI: it has a command-line
interface.

You also need to pay close attention to each of the available menu choices, since
some of the most crucial options are not obvious. Finally, the online documentation
isn't what it could be -- options like the FAT32 unformat command, for instance, aren't
clearly explained there.
Bottom line
The lack of a graphical user interface for PhotoRec may be intimidating for some, but
the sheer power and flexibility of the program can't be denied. I recommend that
advanced users start here; they won't regret the extra effort needed to make the most
of the program.

Recover My Files
GetData
Price: $69.95 (Standard); $99.95 (Pro); $349.95 (Technician). Free trial available
(only previews files)
OS: Windows 98 and later
Recover My Files comes in a few different iterations. The version I reviewed ($69.95)
helps you recover a variety of file types from conventional FAT/NTFS partitions; there
are also Pro ($99.95) and Technician ($299) versions that both add HFS and RAID
support. The Technician version also includes a USB hardware dongle that activates
the software. If you only need to restore image files, GetData also offers a $39.95
app called Recover My Photos.

Recover My Files

Click to view larger image.

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On startup, Recover My files gives you two choices: recover individual files or recover
files from a whole drive (for example, one with damaged partitions). The former
simply scans directory structures for evidence of deleted files; the latter deep-scans
the whole file system and attempts to reconstruct lost partitions or directory
structures.
What's great about the deep scan is it's tunable. The default version of the scan looks
for common file types such as images, documents and music. The most intense scan
runs more slowly and may turn up more false positives, but it tries to match a much
broader -- albeit less widely used -- range of file types, such as database files or
fonts. If you want, you can speed up the search by concentrating on specific file types
if you know what you're looking for. (There's a version of this same feature in
PhotoRec, but it's made a lot more accessible here.)
Files found during the scan will show up in a directory tree, with previews if available,
on the left side of the application window. If the files you're looking for show up early
in the process, you can abort the scan and just recover what you need. A "Search"
tab also lets you ferret out files by various criteria, including data inside a given file
such as a key phrase.
Once you've tagged the files to be recovered, they can be saved to any other device,
with issues that came up during the save (path names being too long, files
automatically renamed because of collisions, etc.) tabulated at the end.
It took 9 minutes and 18 seconds to scan my 8GB memory card and flash drive, but
that was with only the most basic file-recovery options enabled. If I wanted to recover
my CR2 files, I needed to widen the search to include those, because the CR2 format
wasn't in the default file set. That scan took about 18 minutes. Scanning
for all possible file types supported by the program slowed the search down to 2
hours, 18 minutes (so you can see how a focused scan saves time).
Bottom line
The high price tag for GetData's Recover My Files is a bit off-putting, but the program
did an admirable job of scouring and recovering files from my test media -- as long as
you don't mind being patient while waiting for the best possible results.