Computer Power User Article - LC Technology Photorecovery Professional 2009

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LC Technology Photorecovery Professional 2009

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Reviews March 2010 • Vol.10 Issue 3
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LC Technology Photorecovery Professional 2009

Photorecovery Professional 2009
$49.95
LC Technology
www.lc-tech.com

There are few computing troubles as heartbreaking as pulling a “full” memory card from your camera only to find nothing. Documents and other work can be re-created, but photos are snapshots of the fleeting past that, when gone, are irreplaceable. Perhaps for this reason there is no shortage of image recovery tools, but Photorecovery Professional 2009 is one worth considering.

Many free or inexpensive tools are basically glorified undelete utilities, looking for recently deleted files in the filesystem and flipping the “Deleted” bit off. Although there’s a place for these utilities, when you pull a memory card from a camera and it looks empty, that’s normally because the file allocation table (or non-FAT32 equivalent) is damaged or deleted, and a thorough scan of the disk is needed to recover files.

Photorecovery Pro 2009 does just this, scanning every sector in a disk (including flash drives) looking to rebuild files of the type you specify. By default, it looks for image and RAW files, but you can also tell it to look for Office documents, Zip files, text files, and so forth.

As a test, we took a sector editor, intentionally damaged the filesystem of a well-used SD Card, and let a good un-delete program recover what it could; it located 75 fairly recent files in just seconds. Photorecovery Pro 2009, on the other hand, took 14 minutes and un-earthed 416 photos, some of which were from a vacation taken four years ago.

And the software is incredibly simple to use: Just point it to a drive letter, choose the file types to search for from a menu, and click the Start Scan button. It then reconstitutes the files it finds into a target folder on your hard drive.

For $10 less, there’s a “standard” version, and it only lacks a set of flash drive management tools that someone frantically attempting to restore photos doesn’t really need in the first place. We mention the cheaper version because the product requires an annual reactivation equal to half of the purchase price, which we aren’t wild about.

by Warren Ernst

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