Photo recovery challenges are often related to small flash based drives Most cases that land on my desk arrive as photo or video repair tasks. As I have stated before, many of those are the result of botched recovery jobs, or corruption is caused by a file system or physical issue with the drive. Also,… Read More »
Will a USB flash drive survive a drop? Modern USB Flash drives are quite solid and will most likely survive a fall due to their monolithic design. Older USB keys typically consist of several components micro soldered to a flimsy PCB. Apart from the smaller chip (the controller) and the large chip (NAND flash memory),… Read More »
A USB flash drive constantly freezing and disconnecting is most likely a sign of degraded NAND. NAND has a finite number of erase/write cycles, the cheaper the NAND used, the smaller this number is. Also certain conditions can lower the number, such as the drive being exposed to heat. Despite numerous sites recommending you run… Read More »
In several places on this website I make the bold claim that I may recover your photos even if: File recovery or photo recovery software does not. File or photo recovery software recovers corrupt photos. Other labs can’t or recover corrupt files … Of course this is a claim you should not take my word… Read More »
What’s wrong with using (DIY) data recovery software to recover data from an ‘unstable drive’? By unstable drive, I mean a drive that has problems delivering the data due to underlying physical problems. Physical problems that potentially get worse due to stressing the drive. Reduce stress on drive So, first goal is to reduce stress.… Read More »
When choosing the best photo recovery software it’s important to consider from what type of drive you need to recover from. To recover photos from a hard drive, in 9 out of 10 cases generic file recovery software will do better, give less fuzz and be quicker than specialized photo recovery software. In advance: SSD… Read More »
Recovering data from an unstable flash drive often proves to be a lot harder than recovering data that was lost due to deletion or accidental formatting. This is due to the fact that data recovery software is written to address issues at the ‘data level’ while often instability issues are at the ‘disk level’. What… Read More »
In this post I’ll try to explain why photo repair is relatively expensive compared to photo recovery. Why is it many photos can be recovered at a fraction of the cost of repairing just a few images?
I am all for DIY (do it yourself). In fact my first website was called ‘DIY Data Recovery’, and the idea was to provide people with information and tools to perform their own data recoveries. I learned a few things from that. Some things are not suited for DIY’ing. And some things that are DIY-able,… Read More »
In this post I’ll explain how you can create a sector-by-sector disk image of a small USB flash drive or memory card using JpegDigger. This type if disk images are also referred to as dd or RAW image files. The disk image is an exact copy of each sector of the drive that was imaged.… Read More »