Experience with 5 photo-recovery programs

A family member accidently reformatted the SD card in her camera, thus losing all the photos from a holiday. I said I'd try and recover them and googled for photo recovery software, and tried 5 of them out.

Luckily they all allowed me to try before buying, just not saving the found images in the free version.

Here is an overview of my experience.

Digital Leo mmcard Recovery

Cost: $27
- Slow, 1000 sectors per sec
+ Preview files as they are found
+ Finds mpg, jpg
- gets filenames wrong
+ reports corrupted files

Cardrecovery

Cost: €30
+ reasonably fast
+ gives estimate of how long it is going to take
- asks questions you may not know (type of camera etc)
- only finds one kind of file
+ gets filenames right
- no preview while scanning
+ preview after scan
- can't preview big files (10Mb+)
- bad browse interface (select file name, press preview and get preview of 6 photos)
+ good overview of steps to perform
+ reports corrupted files

PhotoOne recovery

Cost: $25
- Didn't work (it couldn't read disk)

FileRecoveryTools for SD

Cost: $50
+ fast
- no preview of images or filenames
- only tells you how many it has found, not what, nor filename
- no pre idea of corrupted files

Smart Data Recovery

Cost: $50
- scanned very quickly (seconds) but found nothing.

An argument against Takahashi style presentations

A Takahashi style presentation is where each slide contains one or two big words, and nothing more, and the speaker talks over them.

However, I personally prefer the telegram style for several reasons:

• If your attention drifts off while someone is talking, for instance while you think about a point that is being made, you can catch up.
• You can point someone who wasn't there to the slides and if the slides are good enough they can get the gist of the talk.
• If someone is a bad speaker you can still get something out of the talk.
• If you are the speaker and you are speaking to an audience not all of whom are native speakers of your language, the slides act as subtitles, and they will be able to follow the talk more easily (this works both ways of course).

And, I have now found another reason: a reporter can quote them as if they had interviewed you. The magazine Computer Weekly has an article "Web 2.0: What does it constitute?", where it reads as if they had interviewed me. In fact all they have done is take lines from my recent talk on Web 3.0 and quoted the words as if I had said them to them.

They treat Tim Bray similarly.

Classic English Sports

This one is as brilliant as Mornington Crescent!