One of the things that ALL photographers have to always keep in the back of their mind is the safety of their data. Photographers spend a lot of time and energy working on their craft and creativity and the last thing they want to have to worry about is the possibly losss of data, most importantly the images they make with their cameras.
Since photos are how a professional photographer makes their living, they need to safeguard their clients data at all costs. To this end, many photographers use multiple back ups and redundancy in order to try and prevent the possibility of losing a clients important images. Those working as wedding photographers are especially vunerable as a completed loss of someone’s weddings images can really ruin this special day for the client and most certainly lead to the likeyhood of lawsuits.
In order to avoid the possibility of a lawsuit over lost images, I always recommend that photographers back up ALL their images and that the best move is to back them up to multiple backup systems, including using some sort of offsite backup systems, whether they copy them all ot a private album in a Flickr Pro account, or Apple’s iCloud storage or any other affordable solution. I also recommend that photographers use multiple internal on-site backups using external hard drives and NAS or Network Attached Storage.
Even with multiple backups, a photographer can still run the risk of losing data because even though it’s fairly rare memory cards DO FAIL! So what is a photographer to do if this happens, especially if the memory card fails before you can copy the images to an external drive? Eneter the software that is the focus of this blog post.
Stellar is a company that makes software that is especially suited for recovering your lost images. Hey things happen, sure a memory card can fail due to a defect or if inadvertantly erased due to exposure to a magnent. It is possible for a person to forget that they have something in their camera bag that has magnents, especially if unlike myself, you like to have a memory card reader with a built in magnetic plate to attach it to the cover of your MacBook Pro. It’s also possible in the rush to get your images moved to your primary editing system to accidently delete all your images from the memory card, especially if working after a long day of shooting. I’m not perfect, I have accidently deleted my RAW files before moving them to my main editing system.
Well, not to worry, Stellar is there to give you the chance to save the day with their Stellar Photo Recovery software. Stellar has been in business since 1993 making software for data recovery not only for photographers but for anyone who has important files that have been lost due to deletion or erasing and then clearing the trash in your system. I know I personally turn of the reminder that asks if I am certain I want to clear my recycle bin in macOS as it’s one less pop-up I have annoying me when I am working.
Over the years as someone who works in I.T. for a living as well as being a full time professional photographer, I have tried numerous programs that are designed for data recovery and even a couple that were made for creative professionals like myself. I am not going to mention names as I don’t want to come off as bad mouthing other programs or companies, but Stellar Photo Recovery is certainly in a class by itself. Using my previous recovery software the only option is a deep scan, which is for cases where the files have been deleted by formatting the card. The entire scan took around 6 hours, but it did recover the files just fine. When I ran the same test with Stellar Photo Recovery the scan and recover took only 13 minutes and it recovered all of the same files without issue!!!
Now the other nice thing about Stellar’s software is you have the option to perform a basic, high level scan, which is much faster and generally for when the files were just deleted and the Trash folder emptied. For those of you who are not both nerds and photographers like myself, when you delete files on a computer, the files are not actually deleted. What happens instead is generally the first character of the file name gets changed to a special character such as an exclamation mark. The operating system in turn stops recognizing the files but they are not totally gone until the same sectors on your disk are overwritten and even then very good recovery software such as what the FBI uses can still recover the files. One of the only real ways to totally destroy the data is using an electro-magnent, but even then the files might still be able to be recovered. This is why governments and companies often have their old disk drives shredded so there is no possibility of the data being recovered.
Ok, enough nerd speak, I can already tell many of you are falling asleep on me or your eyes are glazing over. Back to Stellar Photo Recovery, as I mentioned earlier, doing a basic erase of the files and emptying the Trash and using the high level scan, the software was able to find all of my test images and recover them in 30 seconds. Again, my previous software that is used for recovering photos, I cannot perform a basic scan so it still takes 6 hours to scan the same card and it will recover EVERYTHING. I don’t know about you but if I can do a basic scan and recover of my RAW or JPG files in 30 seconds and it just recovers the most recently deleted files, that is a HUGE time saver!
As I said at the start of this article, if you have a case where you accidently deleted your files before you copied them to a storage drive for editing, I would personally NOT want to spend 6+ hours waiting for a scan to recover those most recent files. I want to move on to editing those images or have other things that are higher priority than waiting 6+ hours for a scan and recovery.
After all of my testing of Stellar Photo Recovery I can highly recommend it to my audience as the Go-To software for anyone that needs to recover their audio, video or photo files without a lot of wasted time and hassle. I am especially pleased that Stellar’s software is geared specifically for creative professionals as none of us want to have the recovery software scanning for and recovering every file type on our hard drive.when all we are interested in recovering photos, videos or audio that we need to urgently get back.
During my testing, the only thing I ran into is the software is not currently able to recover the new .CR3 RAW files from my new Canon EOS R camera. This is not unusual as it takes time for software like this to be updated to support new file formats that the camera companies come out with. On the plus side, I reached out to the company and provided them with an image of one of my .CR3 SD cards as well as provided them some sample image files so they could pass that along to their engineering team. That is awesome customer service and support and another great reason to use Stellar’s software.
If you would like to pick up your own copy of Stellar Photo Recovery for macOS or Windows, head on over to Stellar’s website using the links below and they are offering my audience a discounted price of $60 for the top of the line Premium edition. The Premium edition can not only can recover the media file types I mentioned earlier in this article, but also can repair corrupted photo and video files as well. You can repair multiple files at once and the repair will not only fix the damaged file itself but also repair it’s thumbnail image as well!!!
There is no way you can go wrong with the piece of mind of having this high quality recovery software, so use the links below for macOS and Windows and grab your copy and know that you have the best software possible to recover or repair your valuable media files!
Keep in mind the discounted price is only good for 10 days so make sure you check out the links below to get this awesome software for an awesome price!!!
You can find more info on the Premium edition by using this link
Stellar Photo Recovery for Windows
Stellar Photo Recovery for macOS