[potatolicious]

Hey all,

I unwisely decided to give Lightroom a try yesterday. After importing my latest batch of photos (3 days worth) I proceeded to delete the files off of the SD card, not realizing that Lightroom failed to make copies of it.

Uhoh.

Hours of wrangling with file recovery software later I've got a bunch of reasonably sized DNG files with correct EXIF info. Problem is that they show up as blank in every software I have tried (and crashed one of them).

Is there anything out there will will repair DNG files? I have close to 500 photos in this limbo state and would REALLY like them back.

[wavecurrent]

Have you tried this one, it might work?

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

Mike

[Lowell Goudge]

i use PC-Tools file recover

It has been fairly good in retreving files, but the issue is if you have already done something to try and recover files the base data for further recovery may be lost.

One thing I have learned is that I don't trust any program's file import / export

Although too late for these files, you should consider a standard approach to file downloading.

I always use a reader not a link to the camera

What I do, with file manager is make a copy of my card to a "transfer" directory on my hard disk.

I then do what ever batch rename, on the files in that directory.

my rename is for camera (istD or K10D), and file number to add leading 1 to the sequential file (I am above 9999 on each of my bodies). This way I can deal with multiple cameras that produce similar file numbers.

Then I copy them into a chronological year/month/event directory structure.

Only after I know I have the files in my chronological data and can open them,. do I erase my cards.

[potatolicious]

I'll give Recuva a try - especially since they have a specific TIFF corruption recovery feature (DNG files are extensions of the TIFF standard, so maybe...). After some more reading I've found that the weird psychedelic colors I'm getting in some apps is indicative of a broken TIFF header - the data may very well still be there. I'm now looking for *image* recovery software as opposed to generic file recovery stuff.

Lowell: Yeah, I came from Aperture, hoping to get better Photoshop integration with Lightroom. Aperture makes sense - when you import it copies the files into its own directories... Guess that made me too lazy and/or trusting.

[Arpe]

Try several different programmes until one works. I recovered some that another did not. There's quite a few free ones out there.

[Tomas_IV]

I had similar problem and while I was able to recover only few of the RAW images which then appeared as 16 bit tiffs (and were processable in RawTherapee), I successfully recovered most of the images as jpegs, using a software specialized on that format recovery. It was possible thanks to the fact that the DNG format stores full-size jpeg image along the RAW data. Although the jpeg has quite high compression level, it was of acceptable quality.

[xvad]

Tomorrow I have the same problem with my flash card: at mistake I delete all directories and then take 2 shot at this card! i.e. after deleting i rewriting some area!

I try many utils - some of them recovered JPG files, but not PEF.
I found this thread, try Recuva and vua-lja! all JPG and PEF files were be recovered!
Thank you Recuva! Thank you Wavecurrent!
Some advices: before starting any manipulations with you card LOCK it!
After recovering you can see JPG and TIFF files (I shot in PEF+JPG mode) simply rename tiff
files to jpg.