Long story short, I lost 4 months of photos, including my trips to Missouri, Florida, all the pictures of my cat, etc… I was so upset, and I couldn’t find any software packages that would actually find what I was looking for. Specifically, people had a lot of “blah blah blah”, but then their software didn’t do shit. Anyways, I came across this program called Stellar Pheonix Data Recovery. So far, I have recovered 48 of the photos, and its sitting here cranking the rest of the hard drive, sector by sector. The only problem is that it goes really slow. I started the scan this morning at 9 am, and since then, it has gone through a little more than 11 million sectors on the hard drive, out of 90 million. It will take some time, but I am confident that I will recover most of them.
The coolest part is that I never actually had the images on my computer. I synced my iPhone with the laptop, but I didn’t have photos be one of the items that it synced up. It must have still put them onto the hard drive, just not written to the tables or something, so I am able to recover them. It is the full, high res image too, not a scaled down thumbnail version.
The program is simple to use, and serial numbers are freely available. I hope none of you have to recover data, as it is always stressful, but if you hve a Mac and need to do it, this is what I would recommend.
–mark