Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Memory Card File Recovery

Yesterday one of my students was doing an interview with someone and recording it onto my Fostex MR-8. At first everything appeared to be fine. I played back the beginning of the clip and it sounded good but when I went back to process the file it had just disappeared. The MR-8 stores files on a compact flash card (CF) so I searched around and stumbled upon the program photorec which is part of the testdisk package in Linux. I also found out that it also works with other systems such as Windows and Mac.

The the menu was pretty straight forward and the program worked flawlessly and I was able to recover the lost wav file. If you have a basic understanding of how file systems work and their abbreviations it is pretty simple to use.
Nithin Kamath's Weblog

Detailed instructions can be found at the photorec website that will walk you through how to recover your files. I found this website through
Nithin Kamath's Weblog: Recover deleted files from Memory card in Linux
Thanks Christophe & Nithin.