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[OM] A not so favorable report on PC Inspector Smart Recovery

Subject: [OM] A not so favorable report on PC Inspector Smart Recovery
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 20:28:04 -0500
A couple of days ago John Hermanson reported that he had heard good 
words about the capabilities of a file recovery program for flash cards.
<http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm>

I downloaded the program (bypassing one error message) and thought that 
I would probably wait years to try it out.  I've never had a problem 
with any of my CF cards.

Well, I didn't have to wait long.  While out shooting today with the 
camera set for both raw and large JPEG's I shut the camera off 
prematurely.  I thought the OFF switch was a soft switch and that the 
camera wouldn't power down until any I/O activity was completed. 
Apparently not so for the 5D.  The raw file was successfully saved but 
the JPEG was still being written when the power dropped and that file 
ended up corrupted.

I had thought I was through shooting but eventually turned the camera 
back on an and shot another fourteen frames beyond the corrupted one 
which, at that point, I didn't know was corrupted.

When trying to download with Downloader Pro I got an error message 
saying that an I/O error had been recevied from the media and the file 
was corrupted.  The download stopped after the error without fetching 
the remaining fourteen good frames.  It did tell me, however, that those 
files existed and I was able to successfully download the remainder by 
specifically selecting them without the corrupted file included in the 
download request.  In other words, just ask it to go around the bad spot 
and not try to go through it.

Since the raw file had been downloaded there was really no reason to try 
to recover the JPEG.  However, since I knew I had prematurely shut off 
the camera at the point of failure I suspected that the file was, at 
mimimum, incomplete but I was curious to see what Smart Recovery would 
be able to do.

Well, the answer is not inspiring.  First, it can only recover JPEGS. 
It knows not of any kind of raw files.  Secondly it's just plain pretty 
dumb.  After running for about 2 hours through my 1.6GB of images data 
it managed to recover only the JPEGS up to the same point that 
Downloader Pro had gotten to in a couple of minutes.  Did Smart Recovery 
   report an I/O error and corrupted file as Downloader Pro did.  No. 
It just quitely quit completely as though is had successfully read 
everything on the media.  There was no hint of any error condition ot 
that there might be recoverable data beyond the point of the error.

I recommend that everyone skip this one and find something else.  This 
one is not ready for prime time and I have just uninstalled mine.

Chuck Norcutt


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