Most of us experience a corrupted memory card from time to time. Maybe we took it out of the camera too quickly, or didn't close it on the PC right, or maybe it just decided to get sulky and stop working !

There are a number of viable methods to recover data (photos) from a dodgy card, though none are guaranteed to work, and some work quite destructively, modifying data on the card so if that particular tool fails there is no hope of trying another.

One that I've found to be brilliant is PC Inspector Smart Recovery. PCI SR is a freeware software created by CONVAR who work commercially in this arena, and the only price you pay is seeing the company name on the software - no malicious attachments, no nasties, no spyware, no registration requirements, no fees, no hassle !

Getting It

PCI SR is freely available from respectable download sites such as download.com, which (at the time of writing) has the file at

http://www.download.com/PC-Inspector-Sm ... 66144.html

though this is likely to change as new versions are released.


The download is about 6.2 Mb (quite neat) and delivers an executable which you run to set up the software. You click a fairly standard licence agreement, select the installation location, and in about 15 seconds it's all done.

Once you've installed it the first time you run it you should click on "update" then "update format list" on the top menu like - this will ensure (especially if you are shooting RAW) that the latest format of digital photograph from your camera is understood by the software, and increases the chances of recovery success.

Running it

IMPORTANT if you have a PC that asks you what to do when a chip is plugged in, select the "do nothing" option. Don't even go and look at it with the PC - the more you interact with a memory card the less likely it is that quality data can be extracted.

Run PCI SR and the first thing you see is a 5 second pop up advertising the company - that's it apart from a small "Sponsored By" box in the main screen later.

There are five areas of interest in the main window. The three across the top require a little input from you, the other two provide you with information as the program works.

1. Select Device
Select the logical drive name that is the chip inserted into your card reader. The information in this box will let you know the type of media connected, and it's total capacity to help you ensure you've selected the right card.

2. Select Format Type
Click the dropdown box and select the type of file you're going to recover - this tells the program what it is going to be looking for as it interrogates the chip.
For JPGs leave it as Automatic - let the program do the work.

3. Select Destination
Click on the folder button and browse to where you want to save it on your files. It will let you create a directory if you haven't already.
The filename (defaults to CONVAR) will be the basic name for the files saved, with a sequential number after it.

4. Click START

In the Progress window you can see what's happening to the memory card, and see how far the job has run. Depending on the seriousness of the corruption, the size of the card, and the types of files on it a complete recovery can take a number of hours. Typically I set this off overnight and check it in the morning.