If you have ever gone on a photography trip or a photo expedition, you know that it is not a restful vacation trip, but rather a series of extra-long days filled with intense attention-focused projects. Every morning is a very early rise to catch a sunrise and every night is late night out for sunset and blue hour images or late star photography shoots. The result is that relaxed sleep is not one of the regular events on such trips.

    With such intense days and often a lack of sleep, mistakes happen.

    You hurry to get up one morning, gather your camera gear, reformat the memory to card to get ready, and AAUURRGGHH… you just remembered you had not downloaded the contents the night before because you were too tired after the blue hour shoot…

    It happens…but there is help in the digital world!

    If you make such a mistake, try not use that particular memory card again until you have time to run Stellar to get the best results! 

    Stellar Data Recovery and its little brother, Stellar Photo Recovery, can both “recover” or get back almost all of the images you just deleted when you reformatted the memory card.

    And Stellar’s straightforward interface makes it easy to master. This software makes what would be a nerve-racking task feel like a simple step through plan.

    The screen grabs below are from Stellar Data Recovery because that is what I am using for the added benefits of data recovery from external drives and not just images. Stellar Photo Recovery’s screens appear to be almost the same on the Stellar website: 

https://www.stellarinfo.com

    You start the Stellar software and it prompts you through the process. You select the card you want Stellar to scan, and what you want it to recover. By default all files are selected for scan and recovery, however you can customize the selections if you want.

       You then select the drive to be scanned.

        The scan runs and goes through the reformatted card.

          When the scan is complete, you can "recover" the images and save them to another location.

    Stellar data recovery and Stellar photo recovery can recover deleted files from SD and CF memory cards, files from a reformatted SD or CF card, and even create a image file of a SD or CF card  if the storage media has bad blocks. It can even recover files from unmounted SD or CF cards. 

    What is an unmounted card, you ask? 

    Sometimes a memory card does not show up on your desktop when you insert it into a card reader. The card has probably been corrupted and the system does not see it. You launch the Disk utility to locate your SD card and it is grayed out - or not available for read/write access. OK - this is panic time! However with Stellar Data Recovery or Stellar Photo recovery you can access and save the data and photos on media that the system cannot mount! The same is true of external media such as hard drives, CDs and DVDs if you are using Stellar Data Recovery.

    Is it expensive? That depends on the value of what you will lose if you reformatted  a memory card without downloading the images first!

    For a traveling photographer, having a tool available to recover photos or better still a tool that can recover all sorts of data from a variety of media and even corrupted media seems worth more than the $49 for photo recovery only or $99 for  the full data recovery with photo recovery.