SD card recovery software needed - deleted pictures - advice wanted

[sic0048]

While switching OS on my newest computer, somehow I lost all the digital pictures for this year. I manually copied over all the pictures, music, documents, etc, to another HD before the installation of the new OS, but for some reason this year's picture folders are there, but with no pictures are inside (everything else made it just fine). The drive has been completely rewritten over (at one point I had used 99% of that disk space with WHS - the new OS), so there is no hope of getting those pictures back from the HD.

But I still have the SD card that the original pictures were taken on. While those pictures where deleted and the card reused, I'm sure there are still some pictures that can be recovered from the disk.

I'm looking for suggestions on what software I should use. I'd prefer it to be freeware, but if push came to shove, I'd pay for something.

I've looked online myself, but there are tons of programs and I'm sure 80% of them are probably spyware/virus crap. So I thought I'd ask the community what they thought.

Thanks,

 

[Brian Yokum]

Brian,

I used CardRecovery in the past and it did a good job recovering a bunch of pictures off an SD card. You can download an evaluation copy which will scan your card and show you what it can recover. If you want to recover the files, it's $39.95 to get a license key to actually recover the files. The software was easy to use and was well worth it for me.

http://www.cardrecovery.com

 

[electron]

I personally use Restoration, you can find it mentioned in this top 5 list @ lifehacker.com: http://lifehacker.com/5237503/five-best-fr...-recovery-tools

Just make sure you don't write a single byte to that card (when restoring, restore to another drive). If you aren't comfortable with doing this, and these pictures are really important, consider paying a service to restore these pictures. Also, if you can't recover anything, those recovery services might still be able to recover some of the data.

 

[beelzerob]

Ditto on CardRecovery. We downloaded pics, erased the card, and then *poof* pics were somehow missing on the PC. I tried a couple ones from downloads.com, but CardRecovery found all the pics on there and recovered 'em just fine. Was worth the "investment" to buy it, in my opinion.

 

[kmitchell]

+1 CardRecovery

 

[gatchel]

I have used SanDisk Rescue Pro with success. I think you have to buy it or you get it with some of the higher end cards.

 

[TXFlatLander]

I used Recuva to get some deleted pics off an SD card. I used a USB SD reader that I bought at Walmart for about $10. It is free and from the same guys that make CCleaner and Defraggler