Like many idiots over the holidays I accidentally deleted a few pictures from my digital camera’s Compact Flash card. I was walking around repeatedly pressing ‘Delete’ then ‘OK’ before I realised I had gone into the pictures that I wanted to keep.
I tried the demo of Photorescue and it found it all it seems, but I was feeling a bit miserly and didn’t really want to part with $29 for a few images. In any case, the long way round and a bit of command line action is always good to bolster the ego.
So, thanks to a bit of a Googling I found an excellent Perl script and description of how to recover the files using the terminal from Jay Savage. It did a good job, though a couple of files were corrupt. Not sure whether Photorescue would have managed to salvage these, probably, but it’s hard to tell. It even found a bunch of pictures from months ago, which just goes to show how insecure “Delete” is if you really, really wanted to get rid of the data.