How to Restore Photos from a CF Card (Compact Flash Card)?

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Accidental deletion and drive formatting rank as the top culprits behind data loss, whether it’s on an internal drive or an external storage device like an SD card or a compact flash (CF) card. Mishaps can occur, leading to moments of distress. Nowadays, most professional cameras come equipped with SD or CF card slots for storing captured photos, enabling users to amass substantial data, particularly with CF cards. When you delete a file or folder, it marks the space it once occupied as vacant in the file index, ready for new data to overwrite it. Formatting, similar to deletion, wipes out all data on the drive in one fell swoop.

Typically, the system does not immediately replace data in the location previously occupied by a deleted file. Instead, it simply designates that space as “available.” The system will refrain from overwriting this “available” space unless it encounters a shortage of disk space. In such circumstances, it will only then overwrite the “available” space. Until that point, there remains a possibility of recovering deleted data.

Common reasons for data loss from CF cards

• Accidental deletion: It is one of the reasons for data loss. Sometimes the deletion can be intentional too. And formatting of the drive is another reason for the data loss.
• Improper handling of the device: Physical damage to the device housing the memory card can, in turn, adversely affect the memory card. Furthermore, data loss in certain scenarios can also be attributed to a memory card reaching its storage capacity and the device continuing to operate when its battery is low.
• Firmware damages: You may have received a faulty memory card from the vendor itself. Some firmware damages can be the result of virus or a malicious attacks also.

• If your CF card is severely damaged or its file system is corrupted, Windows may suggest formatting the card as an unsuccessful attempt to read and access the data it contains. Please disregard this message and refrain from formatting the card until you’ve successfully recovered your photos.
• Once you discover about the damage, avoid overwriting the card (means, do not take pictures with the same memory card before the recovery).

This is a very sophisticated and efficient tool to recover permanently deleted photos. It can recover photos in JPG, BMP, TIF, PNG, GIF, RIFF & many more formats. In order to retrieve these image files, the software conducts an extensive drive scan. It provides the added benefit of allowing you to preview image files before committing to their recovery. Furthermore, it offers customization options for selecting the desired picture size during the recovery process. It boasts the capability to recover photos not only from internal hard drives but also from external storage devices like flash drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), CompactFlash (CF) cards, and Secure Digital (SD) cards. Notably, it supports a wide range of image formats, including those specific to popular camera manufacturers such as Canon, Nikon, Fuji Film, Minolta, and Kodak, such as CRW, NEF, RAF, MRW, and DCR, among others. Kernel Photo Recovery tool supports these formats too. Step-by-step working of the photo recovery software is outlined below:

• After completing the installation process, launch the tool. Within the user interface, you have the option to select the drives you wish to repair. When you click on a specific drive from the list located in the left pane, the properties of the selected drive will be shown in the right pane.
• Next, you can select the file formats that you want to recover from the UI.
• Next, the recovery tool will run a deep scan to recover your photos. At any time, you can stop the scan process.
• Next, you can preview the retrieved images.
• At this juncture, you have the option to save either the appropriate photographs or all of the recovered images simultaneously.
• Next, you will be prompted to save the images to the location of your choice.

Read Also : Photos and images fail to open after recovery

Conclusion

In this blog, we’ve covered typical memory card-related problems and offered some preventive measures to mitigate data loss when using CF cards. In our opinion, Kernel Photo Recovery tool is an efficient and sophisticated photo recovery tool, and we believe that the user should give it a try.