Recovering Deleted Photos

My mother has accidentally deleted all her holiday photos from the card.
I told her not to panic, leave the card untouched and I would sort it
out when I see her next week.

I have a SanDisk Rescue Pro 1.0 disc. This seems to work well on jpegs,
so I should be able to sort out my mother's deleted jpegs.

However, I noticed when trying it out on one of my wiped cards (wiped
deliberately, I should add!) which had been used for RAW images on my
5D, that it recovered them as files with a .TIF extension. These files
were unviewable with Adobe Camera Raw and with Canon's File Viewer
utility, even when I re-named them with the correct .CRW extension.
Oddly, I could see them and open them in Canon's (utterly foul)
ZoomBrowser, but not convert them to anything else; all attempts to do
so made it crash.

Two questions:

(1) Does anyone have any recommendations for a better recovery utility
than Rescue Pro? - preferably free!

(2) Does anyone have any idea why Rescue Pro 1.0 won't handle the 5D
..CRW files correctly - is it that it pre-dates the 5D, and if so will a
later version work?

David
--
David Littlewood

>David Littlewood wrote:
> My mother has accidentally deleted all her holiday photos from the card.
> I told her not to panic, leave the card untouched and I would sort it
> out when I see her next week.
>
> I have a SanDisk Rescue Pro 1.0 disc. This seems to work well on jpegs,
> so I should be able to sort out my mother's deleted jpegs.
>
> However, I noticed when trying it out on one of my wiped cards (wiped
> deliberately, I should add!) which had been used for RAW images on my
> 5D, that it recovered them as files with a .TIF extension. These files
> were unviewable with Adobe Camera Raw and with Canon's File Viewer
> utility, even when I re-named them with the correct .CRW extension.
> Oddly, I could see them and open them in Canon's (utterly foul)
> ZoomBrowser, but not convert them to anything else; all attempts to do
> so made it crash.
>
> Two questions:
>
> (1) Does anyone have any recommendations for a better recovery utility
> than Rescue Pro? - preferably free!
>
> (2) Does anyone have any idea why Rescue Pro 1.0 won't handle the 5D
> .CRW files correctly - is it that it pre-dates the 5D, and if so will a
> later version work?
>
> David
> --
> David Littlewood

David,

One of my family members formatted a 2 GB CF card before downloading so
I tried Rescue Pro (which came free with a SanDisk Extreme card, I
think). These were .CRW files with the 1D Mark II ... at first the
program found all the .jpg thumbnails embedded in the RAW files but not
the full sized .CRW files so I got a bit worried, but I was able to
figure out that this was apparently due to the default max file size
setting for R-P being 1 MB ... so for longer files it would quit before
finding the EOF tags I guess.

At any rate I was able to change the setting to 10 MB and after a lot
of churning and thrashing all the files were recovered. So maybe with
the 5D change the max file size value to 12-15 MB in Rescue Pro
(whatever, not sure how big they are) and give it a go.

Bill