As this user comment thread seems to be more about missing blue keys than anything else, I thought I'd add an actual user review here by way of a change . . .

(1) Downloaded, installed, registered in under 2 minutes. No email address harvesting. No nasties. Kudos to the developer: all GOTD promotions should be as clean, quick and fuss-free as this one;

(2) Ran a straightforward test by duplicating the kind of disaster that can befall the unwary: I copied the contents of my Fuji X-T10's current 16Mb SD card to my Windows 7 desktop PC (68 jpegs in total), removed the card, and then placed it in my Panasonic FZ2000. I then formatted the card, this after the usual Panasonic warning that such an action would erase all data.

(3) With the formatting completed, I popped the card into a USB reader and plugged it into the desktop. Windows reported that the 16Mb card -- now appearing on screen as Drive F -- was empty: no data, no images. Everything. . . gone.

(4) I set iCare Format Recovery Pro to work with a quick inspection of my setup's various drives, including the new F: Generic Storage Device, and then an analysis of that drive. It took 16 minutes 43 seconds for it to complete, an elapsed time that ought to be borne in mind by any prospective user: by my reckoning, that's slightly over 1 minute per 1 Mb.

(5) The software reported 986 total files found / 870 files identified. (No, I don't know what the difference might be: there were certainly not 100 DAT and TIDs in the actual output.)

(6) The software's detailed analysis split the results into four folders. The first, Directory 1, comprised AVCHDTN / BDMV entries containing a few kbs of DAT info and nothing else. The second folder, Directory 2, comprised a similar handful of DAT file material. The third folder, PRIVATE, contained more AVCHD references in the form of DAT and TID files, though again, of merely half a dozen kb or so each. The fourth folder, Raw Files, proved to be misleadingly named, because on opening it contained not only a GZIP Compression File subfolder but a JPEG Graphics File subfolder. This last was further disaggregated into three subfolders: 1-300, 301-600, 601-870.

(7) Retrieval of the 870 image files from those three subfolders to a newly created folder on my desktop demonstrated that, as is to be expected from the functioning of this kind of salvage software, various different sizes of the same image recurred. It was also apparent that the older the image -- the 'found' files dated from October 2 2016 to May 24 2018 (three days ago) -- the greater the problem of content loss, that is: the appearance of "banding" across the top, bottom or sides of an image, from which pixel information has been irrecoverable. However:

(8) Every one of the most recent images stored on the formatted card were retrieved as 100% originals with no loss of quality, exif data, or anything else. The actual usable total retrieved in this test -- that is, images either 100% complete or with only relatively slight top and bottom frame loss (landscape) or left/right frame loss (portrait) -- was not those 68 seemingly gone forever but 202.

Though that total might not seem a lot from the software's reported recovery of 870 it is, in fact, a substantial harvest from an SD card that has been used extensively and formatted more than once in the past two years.

Verdict: this was a test to see if iCare Format Recovery Pro could bring back 68 jpegs ostensibly lost due to the formatting in a Panasonic camera of an SD card used in a Fuji camera.

The actual result was the recovery of 870 image files -- though not 870 different images: as noted, this type of software yields multiple sizes of the same shot -- taken over a period of almost 2 years, of which 202 are either 100% at best, or 80% at worst, the same as they were Out Of Camera (OCC).

On which basis then, and even allowing for the fact that no two camera manufacturers deploy the same formatting techniques -- Nikon's, for example, may well be more aggressive than Panasonic's -- there's still every reason to think that iCare Format Recovery Pro will make a decent job of trying to salvage that which an unfortunate camera user might've thought was beyond salvaging.

Thanks, then, GOTD, and thanks, iCare.

MikeR  –  8 years ago  –  War dieser Kommentar hilfreich? Ja | Nein (+32)

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Tested thoroughly today in a real-world situation of data loss due to inadvertent formatting. The software exceeded expectations. Well done, iCare.

MikeR  –  8 years ago  –  War dieser Kommentar hilfreich? Ja | Nein (+18)

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I installed the program and plugged in my external hard drive which had
somehow become formatted with the loss of all files. Instead of recovering
lost files, icare said the drive needed to be formatted.

Glen Johnson  –  8 years ago  –  War dieser Kommentar hilfreich? Ja | Nein (+9)

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