Recently, Harris Interactive conducted a survey of American households to determine how many people actually suffered some form of data loss. The results – 1 out of four people surveyed have experienced data loss of one form or the other. In the same survey people were asked, which types of files did they value the most? The answer – 39% of users said that photos were their most valuable data. Take the two results together and you can see that there is a huge demand for photo recovery. Yet given that, knowledge of what exactly should be done to help you recover deleted photos, is poorly presented on the web. This blog is an attempt to correct that.

Photos are by far the most important files to users.

Photo Recovery Recommendations

We at Digital Assembly, are forensic researchers, who also happen to make photo recovery software and based on thousands of emails and feedback we have the following photo recovery recommendations for you:

1. Do NOT Save/Edit/Append even a single file.

Once you realize that you have lost or deleted your photos, do not write or save anything else to the disk or card. When deleting a photo, the operating system marks the blocks that the photo existed on as available. The actual photo data is not touched, until and unless a new file is saved on to the disk, which has a chance of over-writing the photo data. Obviously the more files you write to the disk, the greater the likelihood, that you will over-write the blocks that contained your deleted photo. Once the blocks are overwritten, no photo recovery software can correctly recover the photos originally stored in those blocks. Bottom Line: Immediately use a photo recovery software to recover your photos.

2. Do NOT Format.

We have had a couple of users say that when their cards were not being recognized, they thought that doing a format would make things better. Formatting, on memory cards, USB sticks and drives may, for the same reasons as point 1, cause you to recover less photos when you eventually do photo recovery.

3. Do NOT Defragment.

If you have scheduled defragmentation of your drive turn it off. Whatever you do, do not defragment. Defragmentation causes blocks to be moved, and the blocks that your deleted photos are in, are more than likely to be over-written.

4. Follow Forensic Practices - Image your drive.

This tip is primarily for those users who have problems accessing their drives/cards or believe that their drive/card is dying. This is perhaps the most advanced of all tips in this guide, and is dependent on the amount of free space you have on a drive other than the one you want to recover from, and the size of the drive you want to recover from. Just to clarify, “imaging” your drive has NOTHING to do with photos/pictures. Drive imaging is a forensic practice that makes an exact duplicate of your drive/card contents, and saves this duplicate as a file. This means that in the future should your card completely fail, or should you accidently write to your card, you may still be able to recover your photos.

You can learn more about imaging your drive by visiting this link: http://digital-assembly.com/products/adroit-photo-recovery/imaging.html

Fact: Imaging is required by most law enforcement agencies before recovery of data.

5. Choose the right photo recovery software for you.

There are many factors involved in choosing a photo recovery software. Again from our experience most users don’t even realize how important these factors are until they start using the software. Some are:

• Does it recover the photo formats I want?
• Can it handle large hard-drives?
• Can it recover fragmented photos?
• Does it identify the quality of recovery?
• Does it allow you to preview your photos in their actual size?
• Does it allow you to find photos if there are thousands of photos recovered?
• Can it recover from disk/card images (point 3)?

In a following blog post we will hit on why some of the points are so important, but this is a time for a shameless plug, our software covers all the points above, and is free to try so give it a whirl. You can learn more about it here at http://digital-assembly.com/products/adroit-photo-recovery/.

6. Data Recovery Service Providers

If your drive is badly damaged and not recognized by the operating system, then no amount of software is going to help you. You will need to show the drive to a hardware data recovery specialist. They tend to have specialized equipment that attempt to retrieve the data from the drives and then they run recovery software on the data. Hardware data recover is much more expensive then software data recovery.

7. Backup your photos.

Backup, backup and make regular or periodic backing up into a habit. This way you will not have to worry about photo recovery at all, and for that matter reading blogs like this!

We take billions of photos everyday. We will take more photos this Holiday season than any previous season. Facebook users, for example, have taken more than 10 billion photos so far and continue to upload 2 billion photos every month! We also lose a lot of photos to deletions, formats, to media corruption, and device failures. About 200,000 people look for a way to recover deleted photos on Google every month. We are happy to have helped a lot of them recover their precious photos.

You should know that even if you lose photos you can recover them. Deleted, corrupted photos can certainly be recovered. Photo recovery software like Adroit Photo Recovery can help you restore those photos. However, it is always safer to not have to worry about photo recovery, and one of the ways you can protect your photos is by following this little known tip:

Tip: Delete less frequently in big batches.

Delete photos less frequently from your camera. Postpone your delete until you have a large number of photos that need deletion.

Follow this simple mantra when you take photos and you will not only be able to prevent accidental deletions or corruptions but also be able to recover more photos in case of accidents.

For the most of us, taking a photo is usually a four-step process:

• Compose a scene
• Capture a photo
• Examine the photo
• Keep it or delete it

Postponing the last step of deleting a photo until the memory card is full (or nearly full) can help prevent accidents. Frequent deletion of photos creates two problems:

• It increases the chances of accidentally deleting or corrupting a photo or triggering a device failure.
• It creates many small free slots (or “holes”) in the memory cards making it difficult to recover deleted photos.

The advantages of deleting photos en masse is that there are fewer chances of accidents (because you will not delete often) and the holes created by deletion are likely to be larger making the likelihood of photo recovery higher.