Recovering Lost Digital Pix

Tim read the post about "SD vs xD camera/memory cards" and asked:

Do you have any recommendations for a freeware program to undelete picture files on an SD card? I have an SD card with pictures from my just completed trip to Nicaragua that I would like to recover. I realize there are commercial solutions.---Tim

Actually, almost any undelete tool should work. That's because flash memory uses those ancient DOS formats--- FAT and FAT32--- to structure their files. The FAT file structure is as old as personal computing itself, and so is as well-known as it gets.

Plus, those ancient times were before viruses, spyware, disk encryption, and such. Disk security was a nonissue. Everything about operating systems was about making data on a disk as easy and wide-open as possible to get at.

That's one of the reasons why Flash memory makers chose the ancient FAT and FAT32 formats: They wanted a widely known, simple and extremely transparent technology for storing data. It's as plain-vanilla and unexotic as you can get, and again just about ANY undelete tool should be able to handle it.

Note that some tools make a deal about recovering image files specifically. This is a mild scam: An operating system doesn't know or care whether a group of ones and zeros is a picture, an MP3, a novel, a (gasp!) blog entry, or anything else. At the OS level, they're all just files. There's really no need for specialized "photo recovery" tools.

So, you almost can't go wrong in choosing a file undeleter: Try your favorite download site or search engine and search for FAT UNDELETE UNERASE FILE RECOVER WINDOWS FREEWARE or some such, and try the most-popular or most-recommended freebie. Odds are, it will work just fine.

Here are 26 freeware file-recovery tools (some rated very favorably by users) from downloads.com:
http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?hhTest=1&qt=undelete+file&licenseType=49&tag=dir.li

And a preconfigured Google search for you:
http://tinyurl.com/57hq7o

Good luck!