iCare Data Recovery - How I recovered some wedding pics from the crashed SD card
Read this review to learn how iCare Data Recovery helped me recover a set of important photos from the SD card of my camera, which included some beach wedding clicks.
As part of my new travel blog, I have been travelling a lot and I usually use my new point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix P610 camera for all the travel shoots. However, this time, one of my team member took the Coolpix with him for another review and I had to use my old Canon EOS Rebel T2i DSLR to the beach to click some events. It has been a while since I used this camera and I think it was behaving a bit erroneous all the way. I finished all the clicks including the beautiful sunset in the beach, annual event by our travel group and a few wonderful clicks of a beach wedding. I was about to leave the place and just wanted to make the last click after the sunset. Giving me a shock, I got an error message in the display showing some error in the SD card storage. and it suggested me to format the SD card. I had no option other than clicking the "OK" button on the error. Camera stopped responding after that. Instead of formatting, I turned it OFF and turned ON again and everything functioned as normal.
But that relief didn't last long. When I reached home, I realized all the photos taken in the beach are lost except the last one I clicked after the error. I could go back and click the sun set but the wedding clicks and the photos of the travel group event were really important. In fact, the entire members of the travel group were waiting for the group photos taken in my DSLR.
I've reviewed a lot of photo recovery software in the past but was confused when it came to real world use for myself. After some thoughts, I decided to try iCare Photo Recovery software, for which I had a license key with me already.
It took only a few minutes to download and install the software. When I started the program, there were 3 options:
1. Recover deleted files from emptied Recycle bin
2. Recover files deleted by formatting, drive not formatted error and various other data losses
3. Recover files from deleted partitions and other partition errors.
In my case, since the files were lost due to the crashing of SD card in the camera, I was puzzled a bit but went ahead with the second option .
In the next step, iCare app showed me the drives in my computer including the SD card from which I lost the files. I selected the SD card and clicked "Next".
A status dialog showed the progress. I was really happy to see the number of files being recovered but I still kept my fingers crossed since I wasn't sure if I can really see my lost photos at the end.
The recovery process took about 4 minutes and it found 164 deleted photos from the storage. The next screen shows the partition I had to select to proceed with the photo recovery.
That's the time it prompted me to provide the license code. Any one using the trial software can reach up to this point but to proceed further with the actual recovery of the deleted photos, they have to purchase the software. The trial version allows recovering up to 20MB of data, but in my case, just 2 photos will finish the quota.
Luckily, I had a license key with me which the company had given for review purpose. I decided to go ahead and use it. It worked like a charm.
Clickeded the "Next" button and it took only a few seconds to finish its internal processing. It presented a clean tree structure that showed the files and folders in the media. All I had to do was, select the folders I want to recover and then select a target location.
Overall review of iCare Data Recovery software
One issue I would like to mention is, it didn't allow me to create a new folder within the software to store the recovered files. I had to switch back to Windows Explorer, create a new folder, then come back to the software, click here and there a few times to view the new folder and then proceed with the recovery process. Other than this small inconvenience, everything else worked perfectly and I was able to recover all of the deleted photos and videos from my SD card camera storage.Other features of iCare Data Recovery
Even though I didn't have to use, let me mention some of the other features as per the product spec:
1. Restore files deleted from the Recycle bin. I tried this myself and it was able to show me a lot of files removed from recycle bin several days ago.
2. Restore files permanently deleted without sending to Recycle bin (Shift + Del)
3. Restore files from deleted drive partitions
4. Recovery from formatted drives
5. Change of file system type to RAW format
The official website has mentioned a lot more features. Also, the website claims it supports all brands of hard disk, external hard disk, USB disk, memory card (sd card, flash card, cf card, xd card, etc.), iPhone, iTouch, Smart Phone, BlackBerry, iTune, iPod etc.
Take a look at the official website for more information - http://www.icare-recovery.com/tech-spec.html
Do you like me to review another recovery software? Please let me know and I will be happy to try my hands on them.
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Great article on iCare data recovery.