Photo Recovery

I had to deal with a data corruption issue this week (sorry to disappoint readers from EMC, but this story doesn't involve any NetApp products).

I had just taken some EMC Collision photos, as well as some photos of the SMVI 1.0 team, when the CompactFlash in my camera took a nose dive, announcing that it was no longer recognizable by my camera. 

Uh-oh.

I brought the memory card home, hooked it up to the card reader on my Windows XP machine, and got the dialog box which appears here.  Not a good sign.

I connected the reader to my Linux box, and was able to access the card as a raw device. 

To be safe, I started by making a copy using dd.  That ran to completion, but dd was not happy, generating hundreds of errors:

Mounting the file system didn't get me very far on Linux, either:

I mounted the raw data as a loopback file system and tried to run fsck to no avail; fsck couldn't find much to recover.

To make a long story slightly shorter, I tried several more file system recovery tools with no success.  Some helpful colleagues recommended several additional tools, and I ended up trying the Linux version of PhotoRec.

The only issue with PhotoRec that worried me a bit is that it wanted to read the raw device (/dev/sdb) directly. 

I had already made a copy using dd, so I proceeded:

PhotoRec recovered the majority of photos from a memory card that was looking severely corrupted.  Kudos to Christophe Grenier for a nice product that was really helpful.

My colleagues recommended a few other tools.  I'm including them here for reference, even though I didn't try them out because PhotoRec worked so well:

• Zero Assumption Recovery
• Ddrescue
• Foremost

Here's a picture of part of the team that brought you SMVI, recently recovered from a corrupted memory card:

So - a successful conclusion with, thankfully, not too much effort.  But it makes me wonder:

Can I get RAID for my digital camera while I'm waiting for flash to disrupt the storage industry?

Comments

[Dan Brown]

Depends on the camera, but for some, you can get a device which will upload photos via wireless networking to some other device, which could have RAID on it. There are also a couple 3rd party devices out there which insert into a card slot and do the same thing.

[Steve Klinkner]

Nice idea - there seem to be a few of those (wireless flash) available now

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wireless+compact+flash

I guess with 802.11 you'd want to be close to your storage if possible.

Though I guess the Holy Grail would be a 3G card that would upload photos to the larger Cloud where everything would have RAID and replication automatically.