JpegDigger’s JPEG repair feature explained

JpegDigger features a JPEG repair option. What is this and what can it do? Repair will not per se result in a perfect image. It can however repair JPEGs to a degree where they can be opened and viewed, including their flaws. JPEG structure Let’s first look at how a JPEG file is organized internally.… Read More »

RAW file recovery and duplicates

Recovery is resulting in duplicate photos One of the drawbacks of ‘raw recovery’ is that generally files are recovered with auto generated meaningless filenames. To conclusively identify files you have to open them although initial culling can be done by sorting by size, or with help of a tool that can sort files by creation date,… Read More »

Recover embedded JPEGs from RAW – Expected quality.

Repairing corrupt RAW files Repair of corrupt RAW files is difficult due to various reasons: They’re proprietary formats. Although many RAW photos internally are organized similar to TIFF files, they’re modified TIF files. Also actual image data encoding is different from format to format. Because they’re proprietary formats, there’s not much software (if any?) to… Read More »

Some thoughts on signature based file recovery

But first, file system based recovery I am A ‘Windows person’ and deal with data recovery on file systems that were for the most part designed by Microsoft. As a consequence I can predict with reasonable certainty the chances of successful data recovery after you formatted your NTFS drive. Because I understand what such a… Read More »

JPEG Recovery Pro Editor

At the time I was researching JPEG repair some years ago, I purchased a license for JPEG Recovery Pro from ‘hketech.com‘ mainly because of it’s JPEG Recovery Editor. I got version 6.1. Recently I noticed an update to version 6.2 was available, however it appears they removed the editor now while I was hoping for… Read More »

can I repair corrupted JPEG files or other photos?

JPEG-Repair Toolkit Dude, can my JPEGs be repaired? “can I repair corrupted JPEG files or other photos?” is a question I get asked many times a week. Or, the variant “I ran your tool JPEG-Repair, but it does not repair my photos.”. Or, “I recovered deleted JPEG files but they are all corrupt and can… Read More »

How can I repair corrupted JPEG files and Google Search

How can I repair corrupted JPEG files? And Google’s useless results. I have stated this before and I’ll do it again: Google Search sucks. To illustrate my point I’d like to show result for the query: “How can I repair corrupted JPEG files?” Google returns useless results at the top and even endorses them in… Read More »

Everything you always wanted to ask a data recovery pro but were afraid to.

This post is just a quick pointer to a new Reddit sub created by several data recovery professionals; r/AskADataRecoveryPro. Reddit is an internet discussion / social media platform where all kinds of topics are discussed. These topics are in separate ‘sub-reddits’. Anyone can easily create a sub-reddit. People who post on Reddit are referred to… Read More »

USB Stabilizer, flash drives and ‘the big three’

Notification: Since this blogpost R-Studio has addressed USB Stabilizer issues (not tested yet), UFS Explorer has added functionality to streamline operation with USB Stabilizer (tested, nice!) and ReclaiMe reworked their imaging module (not tested yet). Just FWIW. I have been experimenting with imaging flash. Using R-Studio, ReclaiMe Pro and UFS Explorer, the ones that I… Read More »

Physically broken SD Card – Data Recovery

Seems that many articles about ‘broken SD cards’ refer to software solutions. If a SD card is truly physically broken no software will be able to help. Suggestions to format the card, use DiskPart, run chkdsk are just bullshit (pardon my French). Broken SD Card Micro SD cards If we talk about the standard form… Read More »