Hi,
Have you ever deleted photos from your camera only a fraction of a second later to realise OOPS I should have kept them, first STOP do not take any photos until you have recovered the deleted ones.

Well I had just deleted the pictures I stopped using the camera and got onto my son who is a programmer and all round software wizz and he directed me to an excellent freeware program.

As an aside when I searched the web I came up with a number of infected sites on the first search page so extreme care if you go searching the web for these types of programs.

This one however is fine, it doesn't have a graphical user interface but it works, is free, and there are step-by-step instructions:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Hopefully you will have your pictures back in no time I did
Regards,
K-BIKE

Thanks very much for the tip.
I will format a sd card and try it.

Hi, in the days of a personal computer, single user running M$$ OS, deleted files were easily recovered using a number of programs.
This is/was possible because the OS does not really delete the file... it would take too long; instead they simply make the space available for writing by deleting the first letter in the filename... that is at least how it appears to us.

What these files do is recover the file tables and allow us to get the file back provided it hasn't been overwritten by something else.

To kill the file permanently one can "erase" it using a variety of programs which overwrite the file and its contents with, often, random numbers. This is the only way to obliterate its contents permanently.

To increase addressable storage, SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) uses sector addressing instead of byte addressing in the previous SD standard.
Byte addressing supports card capacities up to 4 GB, whereas sector addressing can theoretically support capacities up to 2 TB (2048 GB). SD cards support the good old FAT16 or FAT32 format, but most of the SDHC support other formats such as UFS2, ext2 or the proprietary exFAT.

This the reason why some of the older computers and OS or cameras and MP3 players (4 years and older) cannot read some cards with a capacity greater than 4GB. The Master Boot Record and File Allocation Tables are unknown to the OS.

When you delete a file, you are still only altering the first letter of the file name in the FAT table. However you will need a never OS and special software to read or retrieve the FAT and MBR if the format used is different than FAT16,FAT32 or NTFS.

Confusing? OK for the computer challenged people, let put it in simple words: The difference between SD and some SDHC is comparable to an engine with carburetor vs one with EFI.

Exactly what I was going to say...NOT!

my brain hurts

Ned wrote:Hi, in the days of a personal computer, single user running M$$ OS,.......

Ned, I like the way that you spell Micro$oft

I am just waiting for the answer from our second IT tech on the forum (maybe the best).... Roy will keep this debate alive!
Be ready for some comprehensive information!

K bikes are great, but we have other interest too. Why not sharing them on this forum? This will make us more knowledgeable.

'Recuva' is another software that can recover deleted files. I already recovered files on disks that already had been oveerwritten by me. There is always traces of the magnetic profile of the clusters which still can be read out. It's always good to have such a software as a backup    

Crazy Frog wrote:

Ned wrote:Hi, in the days of a personal computer, single user running M$$ OS,.......

Ned, I like the way that you spell Micro$oft  ....

....

K bikes are great, but we have other interest too. Why not sharing them on this forum? This will make us more knowledgeable.

Our IT people have a few others, but this one seems to fit well.  I have to use it for work, but my personal lap top (this one) runs Ubuntu.  I like the ability to swap and change freely available programs for every purpose.