At our camera club the other night, I asked how many people had suffered a ‘cf error’ on their CF memory cards. Nobody had. I must have been unlucky as I have had two failures on two cards this year! They both happened to be LEXAR but were of different age and quality. On the first occasion the problem occurred on a Canon 20D part way through a day but fortunately I was able to re shoot the images on another card. On return, as I was about to bin it having unsuccessfully tried to retrieve the images on my card reader into my PC I noticed that it carried a lifetime guarantee. I duly sent it off to the UK distributor who promptly replaced it with a higher speed version of the same (1 Gigabyte).

I thought no more about it until a few weeks ago whilst on holiday a similar event occurred, this time on a Canon 30D. This time there was no opportunity to repeat the shots so there was a strong feeling of disenchantment with digital storage, to say the least! Fortunately, I had been backing up each day’s images on a portable storage device, in my case, an Epson P-4000. There was nothing more that could be done until my return home and I wasn’t at all sure that anything could be done even then.

On return, I checked out the LEXAR Professional card that had replaced my first faulty card because I had a feeling that it had come loaded with some image rescue software. It had, so I duly installed it on my machine and set it to work on the newly ‘faulty’ card. You can imagine my delight when it recovered all of the lost images along with many more from use much earlier in the year that I had thought to be long gone as I regularly format my cards in camera.

The software is called LEXAR Image Rescue 2 and has my total approval! I don’t know if it will work on other manufacturer’s cards but I don’t see why it shouldn’t. I was told by another club member that the software comes free with ‘Professional’ versions of their card (or can be downloaded from the web site for a small cost)

I hope that by sharing this with you, you won’t have that horrible pit of the stomach feeling when you think that your holiday pictures will be irretrievably lost. Having said that, I do think that it is common sense to back up your images on a daily basis just in case!