A couple of days ago John Hermanson reported that he had heard good
words about the capabilities of a file recovery program for flash cards.
<http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm>
I downloaded the program (bypassing one error message) and thought that
I would probably wait years to try it out. I've never had a problem
with any of my CF cards.
Well, I didn't have to wait long. While out shooting today with the
camera set for both raw and large JPEG's I shut the camera off
prematurely. I thought the OFF switch was a soft switch and that the
camera wouldn't power down until any I/O activity was completed.
Apparently not so for the 5D. The raw file was successfully saved but
the JPEG was still being written when the power dropped and that file
ended up corrupted.
I had thought I was through shooting but eventually turned the camera
back on an and shot another fourteen frames beyond the corrupted one
which, at that point, I didn't know was corrupted.
When trying to download with Downloader Pro I got an error message
saying that an I/O error had been recevied from the media and the file
was corrupted. The download stopped after the error without fetching
the remaining fourteen good frames. It did tell me, however, that those
files existed and I was able to successfully download the remainder by
specifically selecting them without the corrupted file included in the
download request. In other words, just ask it to go around the bad spot
and not try to go through it.
Since the raw file had been downloaded there was really no reason to try
to recover the JPEG. However, since I knew I had prematurely shut off
the camera at the point of failure I suspected that the file was, at
mimimum, incomplete but I was curious to see what Smart Recovery would
be able to do.
Well, the answer is not inspiring. First, it can only recover JPEGS.
It knows not of any kind of raw files. Secondly it's just plain pretty
dumb. After running for about 2 hours through my 1.6GB of images data
it managed to recover only the JPEGS up to the same point that
Downloader Pro had gotten to in a couple of minutes. Did Smart Recovery
report an I/O error and corrupted file as Downloader Pro did. No.
It just quitely quit completely as though is had successfully read
everything on the media. There was no hint of any error condition ot
that there might be recoverable data beyond the point of the error.
I recommend that everyone skip this one and find something else. This
one is not ready for prime time and I have just uninstalled mine.
Chuck Norcutt
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