Silicon Summit Reviews
Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery
by L. Davenport
Have you ever had a time when you were fiddling with your digital camera and mistakenly hit the delete button rather than the next button? Or had a time when you copied everything over to your hard drive, deleted the photos from your memory card by reformatting it, only to discover that there was a problem with the photos copied to your hard drive? Time to panic! All your vacation photos are lost! Woe is you! The answer is - look into getting Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery.
Simply connect your camera or card reader to your Mac, wait until the camera/memory card shows up on your desktop, and then let Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery do it's thing - recovering your files. It will scan the selected volume, hard drive, or connected storage media – which includes cameras, CDs, memory cards, etc. In addition to recovering photos, it can also recover music and audio files.
How it works
Once you select the device to be scan, such as your camera’s memory card, it will start reading every sector on the memory card. One by one it displays thumbnails of the photos that it finds. When it is finished, it will show you a list of everything that it found (divided into folders according to file type, e.g. image files, audio files and movie files). Each item has a checkbox next to its name. Then restore all, some or none. If you are knowledgeable in such things, you can use Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery’s Advanced Option to narrow the search to specific sector regions of your media (using a simple slider for the start and finish sectors). This would be helpful if your lost photos were on a one or two terabyte volume. It would take quite a while to scan a volume of that size. A partial sector search would reduce the scan time significantly. The Advanced Option also lets you narrow the search by specifying the file type (versus scanning for all audio, video, and image formats).
File formats supported
Supported Camera Formats: Nikon (NEF, Intel), Canon (CRW,CR2), Olympus (ORF), Sony (SR2, ARW, SRF), Kodak (K25, KDC, DCR), Fuji (RAF), Minolta (MRW), Pentax (PEF), Sigma (X3F), Epson (ERF), DNG, Panasonic (RAW), MOS. Image Formats: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, BMP, JP2, INDD, PSD, PSP, PCT, Mamiya (MEF).
Supported Audio File Formats: RPS, AU, OGG, WAV, MP3, AIFF, MIDI, M4A, M4P, WMA, RM, RA.
Supported Video File Formats: MOV, AVI, ASF, WMV, MP4, M4V, 3GP, MPEG, DV, 3G2, M4B, DIVX, OGM, MKV, ASX, VOB, MOI, MTS.
Testing
Test #1 Though I had quite a few full memory cards, not one had a problem (wouldn't you know it - when you want a problem it never happens). So I deliberately deleted a group of photos from one of the 8 GB memory cards. I next unleashed Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery and watched as it found all - except one of my photos. Not bad if I do say so - losing only one rather than all. After scanning your media, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recover displays a list of all found files (along with thumbnails of each image). This makes it easy to recover all or only the ones that you want.
Test #2 In my next test, I had Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery check one of my cameras that only has 4 GB of internal memory (no memory cards). It chugged away and found everything that was deleted but seemed to have a little difficulty with the (very) short MP4 videos. almost every one was flagged as only being a partial recover.
Test #3 In my final test, I reformatted the internal memory of the camera in test 2. Out of 347 only 257 were recovered. Though that’s not perfect, to me that’s great! 257 is a whole lot better than 0. I really didn’t think it would recover anything from a reformatting. Know this, once new photos are taken, and written to the card, their data will overwrite the data from previous images. So, if you accidentally format a card, or delete a bunch of photos, stop using the card. Also, the recover process only brings the photos to your hard drive. It does not restore them to your camera or flash card.
The Skinny
Evaluation: Though it didn’t recover 100% of the photos and had a little problem with the videos, I was impressed with the over-all performance of Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery. I feel whatever is recovered is more than you had before the attempt. So it is a success in my eyes. It has a simple interface and is a no-brainer to use. Though I had no real problems that I needed its services for, I have the peace of mind of knowing that if disaster happens - all is not lost. I highly recommend you check out the demo. It will tell you up-front whether it can restore anything. If anything is found, you must purchase the program to restore your photos. I like this. This way you don't waste your money if it can't restore your photos.
Requires: Mac OS X 10.3.9 to 10.7 (Lion); Processor: Intel, PowerPC (G3 or later); Memory: 512 MB RAM recommended;
Hard Disk Space: 40 MB
Company: Stellar Information Systems Ltd.
Street Price: $39
Available 30 day demo
Resource: Silicon Mountain Macintosh User Group SMMUG
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