[Drew]

I made a bit of a balls up at work the other day and managed to delete a load of photos from the memory card on work's camera. I did however manage to find some software [TOTALLY FREE!!!] which allowed me to recover everything.

I am only writing this so that it can get lost way down the list somewhere, but so that should some poor sap (like me) need to find something in the future, then a simple search of most of the words they might use should bring up this thread.

Anyway, the software is Test Disk, and while it's not the simplest software ever, it has a reasonable manual (mostly online), which should allow you to use it happily. I'd say it was for someone who has played with computers a bit, and has looked at Dos. The most I ever did with Dos before this, was learn how to shut the computer down at a designated time.

[Control freak]

This one is windows based and has given me pretty good results when Ive had to use it in the past. Its also freeware so no licensing issues

PC Inspector File Recovery

[dave]

This one is windows based and has given me pretty good results when Ive had to use it in the past. Its also freeware so no licensing issues

PC Inspector File Recovery

I've used that too.

[Drew]

This one is windows based ...

That's a good point. I am running XP, but it looks as if Test Disk runs on Linux and Macs too.

[slackline]

Unless the "disk" is physically damaged, then if you delete things that you want back you should stop using it straight away.

The reason being is that generally when you delete a file its not actually removed from the disk.  Its the reference in the file-tables that say which sectors file123.jpg is physically located on the drive that are removed, so it appears to the operating system that the file no longer exists.  It stays there until its over-written or recovered with one of these tools.

(Very broad and simplified overview really).