Sep 03

Do you own a digital camera? If not, you’re missing out on a great way to take and share photos like never before.

Digital cameras are affordable. A good digital camera can be purchased for less than $200 at most retail or online stores.

They are practical. They are small, easy to carry and easy to use.

Digital pictures can be emailed, put on a CD or DVD, emailed to a local store or drug store and printed out and picked up in an hour.

I have always owned Sony cameras. My current camera is a Sony DSC-P32 which is a good basic camera. I use it to take photos for my blog, documenting damage to computers, family events, special occasions, home inventory, and many other uses.

My kids and I bought my wife a Sony DSC-W55/P camera for Mother’s Day. The camera is slim, easy-t- use camera that is perfect for my wife. The camera is pink and comes with a matching pink carrying case that fits in my wife’s purse.

Sony DSC-W55/p

We are now amassing a large collection of photos on the computer. We have backed them up on disk and online. We have made a few slide shows and put them on disk to watch.

One of the things we want to try with are photos is digital picture frames. Digital picture frames are becoming more popular as more companies are producing them and the cost is coming down. A digital picture frame will also make a great gift this Christmas.

Look for a review of digital picture frames coming soon!

Aug 31

One of the frequent request I receive as a computer support technician is: Can you recover or find my photos? And the answer is, you guessed it; maybe. But the odds of recovering data/photos is greatly increased with the right software.

Baring any mechanical failures of a drive, files that have been deleted, even cleaned out of the Recycle Bin, most likely can be recovered.

That’s the good news. Even better news, now the average person can recover deleted files with a powerful program called Handy Recovery.

Handy Recovery

Handy Recovery Capabilities

Handy Recovery can recover all types of files on all types of drives and all types of formats. Handy Recovery can recover media files in all formats, including: RAW, JPG, JPEG, TIF, GIF, RiFF, TIFF, AVI, PNG, BMP, MPEG, MOV, WAV, MIDI, QuickTime, etc.

Specializing in multimedia recovery, Handy Recovery can be used for CF card recovery and other camera storage media. Handy Recovery can recover files on other media such as Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick Pro, Memory Stick Pro Duo, miniSD, MultiMediaCard MMC, SD Card, SmartMedia, xD Picture Card, CDR / CDRW, PDA, DVD / DVD RW, Zip Disk, Hard Disk, PCMCIA PC, Floppy Disk, Micro Drive, any compact flash devices.

Format types that are supported are FAT 12/16/32, NTFS and NTFS 5 + EFS file systems.

Features of Handy Recovery

The interface is easy to understand and use and gives you valuable information about your disk and files right up front. Files that are deleted are displayed with an x. The bottom pane shows a thumbnail of the image. The probability of recovering the file is listed also which is very handy.

find deleted files with Handy Recovery

As a computer professional, I use Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional to recovery data. Ontrack cost $2,000 a year to use and is one of the best recovery programs in the industry. I tested Handy Recovery and compared it to Ontrack.

For the test, I used a Sony memory stick out of my camera. The memory stick had 77 photos on it and has been in use for several years in which time I have taken hundreds of photos. I ran Handy Recovery on the stick with the images, and both programs found the 77 images and several hundred images that had been erased.

handy recovery

I then deleted the image files and ran a scan again; once again, both programs found all 77 deleted files and the other deleted files as before.

Results

Both programs found all 77 deleted files and several hundred files that were deleted up to 2 years ago. Handy Recovery showed more information about the files found and showed a thumbnail of images.

Handy Recovery–2.5 year old image

It took about 10 minutes to scan the memory stick in both programs. Handy Recovery has the option to run an extended analysis and you can choose which file types you want to search for which can save time.

Both programs allow you to choose individual files and folders to recover, but only Handy Recovery lets you preview the images first in a preview pane.

With Handy Recovery, you can browse the contents of your disk like in Windows Explorer. The only difference is that you see deleted files and folders along with the file and folders that have not been deleted. The program can search for files by name or type and show the probability of a successful recovery for each file. Recovered files can be saved to any disks accessible on your system.

Bottom Line

Handy Recovery is a powerful program that can recover lost file from any media. Handy Recovery is performed just as well as a professional, $2,000 program. Handy recovery is easy to use, affordable, and is a must have for anyone who wants to find and recover lost files.