Recovery for lost camera card pics

[Ozzie]

The other day, my daughter calls me at wok all in a tizzy (not a stretch for a teenager)...she was at a school function taking pics like crazy, came home and viewed them, and then the next day they were seemingly gone.
The first thing I told her was DON'T WRITE TO IT. I would look when I got home.
Now we all know how to get software...but I found a freebie that pulled all the lost pics off that XD card - close to 100 without any trial banners of any kind.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery ...no motivation at all to recommend this, other than I have a happy daughter and put a copy on her puter...

[ctal]

Thanks for the tip, Ozzie.

I've also had good results with Lexar Media Image Rescue -- it successfully recovered for me all of about 75 photos that were on a cellphone transflash card. These photos had been taken at various times over a period of several months, and during those months the card had been reformatted several times. Apparently pictures taken after reformatting were not placed at the start of the memory, but rather at a memory location following the last photo taken, even if that last photo had been "deleted" in the reformatting process.

Regards,
-- Al

[Ozzie]

...I wonder if this has something to do with the naming/numbering scheme the camera puts on the files? I've seen some strange numbering and positioning of files on camera cards too.

[ctal]

After thinking about it a little further, I suspect that the reason they do that (not writing new photos at the beginning of the memory after formatting, and instead writing them after the location of the previous photo), has to do with "wear leveling" to prolong the life of the memory (flash memory has a limitation in the number of erase/re-write cycles it can undergo). Here is a paragraph from Wikipedia's page on flash memory (keep in mind in reading this that erasing is done on a block-by-block basis):

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other blocks). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors; this technique is called wear levelling.

Regards,

-- Al

[DBoone]

Doggone it! I learn something new every time I visit this place. My head is gonna explode if this keeps up.

[ctal]

Originally Posted by DBoone

Doggone it! I learn something new every time I visit this place. My head is gonna explode if this keeps up.

We'll try to go easy on you in the future!

Regards,

-- Al

[Ozzie]

LOL

...so 100,000 cycles for flash memory...I was wondering how long those might be good for. Since you can get a 4 gigger for under 20 bucks (closing in on 10 now?) I guess I'm not gonna be too worried about trashing them.
Wear leveling, eh?...interesting idea...

[ctal]

Obviously 100K cycles is plenty for taking pictures, but what I wonder about is how the erase/write cycle limitation is increased or overcome in the emerging flash-based solid state hard drives. I found this at Wikipedia:

There is also some concern that the finite number of erase/write cycles of flash memory would render flash memory unable to support an operating system. This seems to be a decreasing issue as warranties on flash-based SSDs are approaching those of current hard drives

I wonder how they are doing that; 100,000 erase/write cycles (within a given address block) doesn't sound like a lot for a system drive.

Regards,
-- Al

[dreckas]

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