Hi,
about 5 or 6 years ago I took loads of photos on my, at the time, relatively new camera.. I stupidly formatted the xd memory card after I got back from my holiday and lost the lot

A friend tried to recover the data at the time with no joy but I wondered, as technology has advanced, if there were any reliable programs or companies that have a high success rate recovering lost data.

I've kept the card all these years on the off chance they may be recoverable and actually forgot I still had it until I had a bit of a clean out.

No photos were saved to this card after I formatted it

thanks in advance for any advice or recommendations!

Recuva? http://www.piriform.com/recuva

From the CCleaner people.

Haven't used it for a while and its not currently installed, but for a formatted card you may have to enable the option "Scan undeleted files" or something like that. Has been about 18 months since I used it so I'm sure it's even better now.

Let us know how you get on.

Thanks for the link.

Just tried it, set it to deep scan, and nothing

it did find a load of 0 byte files that it said were unrecoverable but there were over 700 of these and there was only about 50 photo's on the card so not sure what these were

Not sure if its on windows but I had good success with http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

thanks redtux, I tried that program you suggested but still no joy.

I emailed a company (as prepared to pay if neccessary) and was told that Fuji's have a nasty habit of totally deleting files when formatted and even though they could try (for £10) the chances are they won't be recoverable.

Flash memory is a bit of a pain to recover, unlike HDDs you don't need to erase the data 100 times to make sure its gone.

out of interest - if a single pass can zap the data to an unrecoverable state - then why do you supposedly need a multi-pass shredder to fully clean a pc - hard drive?

Completly different type of storage technology. HDDs use magnets and to totally erase the data can take many passes. Flash memory doesn't have the same problem, data can be erased much easier.

Essentially when you delete a file, your hard drive doesn't delete it, more so it tells the HDD's file allocation table (the thing that keeps your hard drives content and structure indexed) that you can now overwrite that portion and use it. The reason you can recover files is that generally your HDD won't use recently written space to use new files straight away, unless there is no other space to use.

The file allocation table (as well as the way RAM is used to write data before it goes to the HDD, and other things) is the reason why you should use the safely remove option before yanking a USB drive out of the PC.

Its the same with all memory formats, so you SHOULD be able to get files from a memory card, but files have probably overwritten the data on a memory card.

No no no no no!!!

Old magnetic hard disks did indeed need several passes, with modern disks only one pass is necessary to make the data unrecoverable.

I know the "delete" just changes a status indicator in the fiel header - but the shredders that erase the file still execute multiple passes over the data - if the first pass sets every bit to say, 0, why would you need multiple passes. How could anyone recover the previous state of the bit, even after 1 pass.

did you just try testdisk or photorec as well?

Because magnetic storage is not a simple on off switch, it involves magnetising a certain area on the disk in a certain way. Putting it very simply, if the 'overwrite' bit is not in precisely the same position, i.e. slightly offset from the original bit, then you could still measure traces of the original bit from around the edges.

But, this does not apply to modern hard disks as the much higher data density basically makes it infeasible.

I tried photorec.

I must just be lucky then, I buy them on Ebay and have no problem with them.

You don't. You are exactly right, the idea of multiple passes was based on a misreading of a scientific paper that applied only to old harddrives of the time that wrote in a different format and far wider tracks which might have left some readable material. It has no application to todays drives, no one has demonstrated that they've been able to retrieve usable data from an erased modern drive from even one pass. No data recovery company will even take that job, for any amount of money.