Recovering your pictures from a damaged memory card

For many bicycle tourists one of the most important parts of a tour are the memories. Often these memories are preserved for later review and sharing with friends on the memory cards that your digital camera uses.

One concern that often comes up is the reliability of the memory cards themselves. I have read somewhere that memory cards can do in the neighbourhood of 10,000 problem-free writes before pictures start becoming corrupted or problematic to transfer off the card.

This doesn't guarentee problem free operation and sure enough there have been references to this problem on the various bicycle touring mailing lists, newsgroups and forums.

So what do you do should this problem happen to you?

Dave Johnsen mentioned reading an excellent article that discusses this problem. One software tool mentioned in the article was Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery.

Here is the first paragraph of the article that Dave discovered reprinted with permission from Lance Ulanoff.

"My digital camera is in my company nearly constantly, and even though it's a craggy and increasingly recalcitrant 2.1-megapixel Epson 850z, I still appreciate it. Until I cobble together the $900 or so I need for a Canon Digital Rebel EOS, the 850z is my only everyday camera. In the past, I've written about my fears of losing the digital photos I've taken because of a calamitous, hard-drive-corrupting computer crash. What I didn't realize is that there is a more immediate way to lose your digital memories. "

You can find the complete Recovering Lost Images article by Lance Ulanoff at the PC Magazine website.