Disk Drill is also a memory card recovery software for Mac OS 10.5+. It performs memory card recovery from memory sticks, compact flash, IBM Micro Drives, SD Cards, MMC Cards, XD Cards or Secure Digital Cards. Actually, if you have a card reader and it can read your card, or at least mount it into Mac OS, Disk Drill will easily analyze it and find your lost data, if it's still there.
Disk Drill can recover data from memory card even if it was corrupted, formatted or damaged. Still, as you know, there are chances that your data is gone for good depending on certain actions. Disk Drill will never write to your memory card during the recovery process, so it's really safe to use.
How to...
“You throw away an old folder without checking its contents, or prematurely decide you won't be needing a certain file anymore. That's why you should consider using an application like Disk Drill; to protect you against yourself and the fancies of technology.”
Runs on any PPC
or Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5+ |
|
How to: memory card recovery software for Mac
#1
Things to keep in mind
Photo recovery from memory card
Most cameras don't wipe the pictures completely from your camera memory card on deletion or formatting. In most cases only filenames and file properties are erased, while your photos and movie data may still remain in the memory card. Disk Drill can still try and recover deleted photos from your SD or other memory card.
Keep in mind, the less actions you do with the memory card you are going to recover your data from, the higher the memory card recovery chances are.
If you simply erased files on your memory card right from your camera, Disk Drill has very good chances to retrieve them. However if you took more pictures to the same card after the initial deletion, you may have overwritten whatever Disk Drill could recover.
Formatted memory card recovery
Even if your card can't be read by your Mac, if it's shown as having no partitions or logical structure and requires formatting, try Deep Scan, it will drill down to the data sectors of your memory card on a binary level to search for remaining pictures, music or other recoverable data.
#2
Get Disk Drill
Disk Drill requires Mac OS 10.5 or newer to run and recover memory card data. Once you downloaded it to your Applications list, launch it and follow these steps to complete your compact flash recovery (or sd recovery, etc).
#3
Connect your camera or card-reader
Once your memory card is mounted to your Mac, you can start the memory card recovery process. Remember, that you have to mount your sd, compact flash or memory stick, or other card in a mass storage mode. If you can only communicate with the card via MTP-protocol, recovery will not be possible. Launch Disk Drill, switch to Recover option, find your mounted card in the list and select it.
#4
Scan your memory card with Disk Drill
If your memory card is formatted in FAT or NTFS file system, you can use Quick Scan to try and locate deleted files based on the data in your file system tables. This is fast, but won't be available for memory cards formatted in other file systems and in case there are more serious damages to your data than mere files erasure.
If all you see is Deep Scan as an option, go for it. It will take some more time to scan your memory card, especially if it's 32 GB or bigger. Once the deep scanning is complete. You will see the list of files Disk Drill (memory card recovery software) can recover from memory card.
#5
Memory card recovery: final step!
Deep Scan will be able to recognize many file formats when scanning your memory card in binary mode, including JPG, PNG, TIFF, MOV, MP4, etc. Once the memory card recovery results are available, you will see them in the final dialog listing all recoverable file names. This is where you can do image or file previews. Select items you need recovered from your SD card and save them to your internal or external hard disk. That's it, you are done with SD recovery (or CF, or other memory card). Now you are free to format your memory card to be able to use it again, as you have all the lost data recovered!