There is no word to describe the feeling of dread that I had immediately after formatting my largest SD card in-camera. I did not do my due diligence and my check was cursory. The card seemed full of my portfolio images which are safely on my laptop and back-up drives however sandwiched in between my most recent job and portfolio images were some pictures I took on a recent trip to Vietnam and which are the among the best pictures I have ever taken on a trip. Feeling hopeless, I navigated to the 2022 folder on my laptop and their absence had me searching the web uselessly for options on whether or not it was possible to recover them. Being in a position where I am saving every pound I can to top up my equipment, relying on a free recovery option made my chances even smaller.

Fortunately for me, something called Disk Drill popped up in a blog post about a guy who had spent ‘hundreds of dollars on scam software’ and the software scanned the SD card, which took about 45 minutes for a 128gb card. My heart was in my chest as I navigated the in-software browsing window and I could see the little thumbnails of images that I had so regrettably deleted. Helpfully, the software had a column which told you the odds of whether something could be recovered, ranging from ‘high’ to ‘low’. The software scans the card in date order, so frustratingly the images that I had stored on my laptop loaded again, one by one. I could not believe the the software was working, and I saw a tiny thumbnail of my prized Vietnam images that I had deleted. Excitedly, knowing that I had 500mb of recoverable data worth on the free version, I selected the images that allowed me to see if the software really worked and a dreaded pop-up filled my screen as opposed to my computer directory. I thought £88 just to rescue a few images was really steep and even if I wanted to dip into my equipment fund I did not appreciate blogs saying that you could have up to 500mb when the reality the free version is simply a scan to show you if the software worked. I have no idea if the images would make it into my directory/could be rescued so I left it alone.

So I did more research and found IBoySoft – another data recovery tool which was a little less slick than the Disk Drill software and would not let you view the images as the software did its job scanning the SD card. When the scanning was completed, I decided to try and recover one image to see if this was possible but alas, another pop up window with costs came up. If it cost, say £5 to recover 5 images then this would be something I would have definitely paid for, but for me the £88s and the ‘$89’ were just too much to recover a handful of images. I did not even know if the images could be recovered as people who had left bad reviews seemed to only be able to rescue low resolution thumbnails! I stared at the company’s annoying logo of a cartoon boy and tried to think positive thoughts.

This is where I decided an AI takeover is not imminent as each time I thought I had found software with a decent free trial, the words ‘WINDOWS’ were immediately below, and searching for free recovery for a Mac simply dumped be back with the Windows options. I had the wild idea of going to my dads house and using his PC and as I became more relaxed about this – after all I need to leave the M25 at some point – I found something called ‘EaseUs’ a data recovery tool with a free option where you could recover up to 2GB. Perfect! I installed this with high hopes and gingerly tried to recover one image I took of Train Street in Hanoi (a famous street where a train trundles inches past houses and businesses) and HOORAY! it worked. I managed to salvage 28 images in total, including my favourites. However, this did not equal 2GB whatsoever, I was only able to rescue 700mb. If there is one thing that I find annoying it is being misled. A pop up window came up when I tried to rescue an image of a slightly out of focus Buddha so I decided paying – wait for it – £88 to rescue that was not worth it.

There are other free options as well, such as Photorec for Mac but this is a where coding skills are required and with only a basic grasp of Python this would become a major time sink for me where spending £88 would make sense. However this cost of living crisis seems to have affected the bottom line of these data recovery companies and almost all of them have deleted the useful if limited functions of their free trials. For me, Data Rescue 6 was the worst one as you cannot even preview the images during scanning and when you try and recover your files, the directory window loads up and all looks promising until…you guessed it…a licence window pops up.

The purpose of this long drawn out, mildly whiny blog are to praise EaseUs who, despite misleading claims of a being able to download 2gb of data for their trial version, actually managed to allow me to rescue 28 images that are close to my heart.