Hornswaggled

Filed under stupidity:

1. I know better
2. I know better
3. I know better

Last night I popped in a trusty old SD memory card to transfer an important Excel file and when I opened the drive everything was gone. I went through the progression in my head on when the last time I saw the needed files and if they could of been backed up anywhere else and the answer was an unpleasant one, nope.  I then remembered I had heard of some memory card recovery programs on the Tekzilla podcast and did some searching. I tried the ones that give you a trial in the way they will fully run and show you the missing files but not allow you to save them until you pay them a heft 80 bucks (this was the program recommended by Tekzilla) and then a few others that seemed to only look for jpg’s and other image formats.  I then went to Google to search for ‘memory card restore programs’ and found PC Inspector Smart Recovery that was free and gave it a whirl. It too only found images so I went to the publisher and checked to see if they had another version for more complete recovery and they did.

PC Inspector File Recovery:

Recover deleted files from your hard drive, memory cards, even formatted or damaged drives.

This seemed perfect. I ran the recovery console on the memory card and it pulled in about 15 excel files. Perfect! Now I went to open them and guess what, they are all corrupt.

Great, back at ground zero. To be continued I hope….

Side note: The original machine was sold on Craigslist that day and is the reason why the files were put onto the 4gb SD card. I have contacted the person who purchased the laptop and asked to see if I could swing by and run the recovery program but haven’t heard an answer yet. Wish me luck.

**Update**

I was able to get a hold of the guy that purchased the laptop and he was kind enough to let me take a look at the machine and run a program to restore deleted information from the recycle bin. The program took about 45 minutes to run and after a few minutes narrowing down the search field I was able to find the Excel file from over 65K files that were recovered.

So my advice is to stay persistent and you may be able to recover those deleted memory card files!