Friday, June 18, 2010

FREE CF Card Data Recovery in OS X!!






PHOTOREC is AWESOME.

Here's a How-To post from the Faceman Photography blog (your mileage may vary):

Here are the simple steps to running this under Mac OS X (FWIW, photos on the card were shot in Canon RAW and camera's CF card was mounted via a card reader under Mac OS X 10.4.9):

(1) Download PhotoRec v6.6 here. Don't worry that it's also a download for an app called TestDisk, which I haven't played with (yet).

(2) Uncompress the file testdisk-6.6.darwin.tar.bz2

(3) Inside the folder that results, you will find a folder called "darwin" that contains the UNIX executable called (unsurprisingly) "photorec".

(4) Double-click photorec to launch it into the terminal and here's what you'll see:

(5) Select the volume that represents your memory card and hit return to Proceed. In this case, /dev/disk1, is what we want.

(6) At the next screen, which looks like this:


select the partition table, which should be fine at the default setting of "Apple partition map" and hit return to get to this screen:



(7) "Search" will be highlighted. Hit return to start file recovery and you'll see this:



(8) "Other" should be highlighted and should work just fine (or at least it does for me with my setup). This will take you to the last step where you select what directory to recover to, in which case the default folder should be fine. Just select "Y" at this screen:



It will then start processing your memory card and saving what it finds to a folder called "recup_dir.1"

(9) Sit back or go make a sandwich and come back to a folder full of recovered files (hopefully)...


So, there it is. . . Your mileage may vary, but this is DEFINITELY handy to have for anyone who shoots with HDSLR's, or RED CF Cards. . .

5 comments:

JZ said...

Yes, PhotoRec is a pretty mac recovery program even though it works through command line. There is another freeware called Exif Untrasher (find from this blog posting) can also do the job.

Mike Mazzotta said...

Cool! I'm totally gonna check that out!!

KenKHT said...

Unfortunately Exif Untrasher can nay do jpeg files. Cannot recover RAW (according) to its website, which is useless for me.

KenKHT said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Barry said...

Hi,
I realise this post is a little old, but it was exactly what I needed. I followed the instructions and it recovered 362 files (which was about the right amount), but when I went to the folder all the files were. txt files? Did I do something incorrect?