Problem: a butthead like me screws up while importing digital pictures from its Sony digital camera into iPhoto, total mess, no backups, no trash-canned files, nothing… just lost data.
What to do now? a few Google searches reveal no big deal of MemoryStick data recovery tools out there. Every vendor offers its very own pay-your-ass-for-rescue deal and, what the heck, I’m not made of money. But I decide to not give up so fast and try to do the recovery myself.
Most people think that data recovery is a complex process involving rather sophisticated algorithms and intensive processing duties. I totally agree with them, but it turns out in some cases a relatively simple and expensive way to recover lost data is available. You just have to understand a few bits from here and there (filesystems, image file formats, programming, digital imaging tools…) and have some patience.
This is the first of a blog post series (around 3 of them) about how to perform DIY data recovery on any flash memory card with flawless results.