Digital photo recovery device

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daveuprite
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Digital photo recovery device

Post by daveuprite »

Does anyone have any experience, positive or otherwise, with these USB plug-in photo recovery card things that keep coming up for sale on the internet?

I've been looking through past photos for our photo-link thread, but I know I have many more on a couple of old laptops. It would be good to suck all the pics off all the computers and get them into one place. That's what the adverts promise these recovery cards will do.

Do they work on PCs / laptops that still turn on but went wrong in the past?

Please don't get too technical in your replies. I'm fine with using various software packages but how a computer actually works is a totally dark art for me...

Cheers, Dave
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by frenchy3 »

I have not used this kind of device but i back all my photos up on an external Western Digital solid state hard drive which is 1 TB. I think the SSD are longer lasting than the conventional disc hard drives. It plugs into the mains and the laptop via USB and is fine for my needs.
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by garyboy »

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Last edited by garyboy on Tue Apr 21, 2020 7:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
daveuprite
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by daveuprite »

Yeah, I've got an external hard drive too. I keep thousands of music tracks on it. But with those you have to actively save/send to it every time you store a photo. These new-fangled devices claim that you can just plug them into a PC and they will find every one of the photos on that computer, and then copy every one on to the device. Sounds cool.
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Snaf MKII
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by Snaf MKII »

It depends on whether the hard drive works, I have used the following which did the job for me.
https://www.easeus.com/?ad&gclid=Cj0KCQ ... q5EALw_wcB

If the machine actually runs just go to files and search for jpg, that should bring up all your pictures and very little else, you may want to search for hidden files as well.

I've also use the bulk renaming facility to search which found pictures not saved as jpg.

Like you I know that i'm missing some pictures and you may have noticed I've posted a couple lately which has inspired me to trawl all known locations, old phones, laptop, photobucket, onedrives, clouds etc etc. I've even been through some old forums that had my pictures in and stolen them back :-)

Just remember to back up what you already have first before hacking around your hard drives. Also one back up is not enough, use the cloud services as well.
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by garyboy »

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Last edited by garyboy on Tue Apr 21, 2020 7:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by phil_h »

I've used easeus too, and I've currently got 'photorescue' as well.
Its a tedious job waiting for a 'deep search' but you get to see (almost) everything you've ever had and moved or deleted, which you then have to sort through and name. Its best to go for everything that can be recovered and store that on another drive before sorting wheat from chaff.

Sadly I'm rather geeky in my backups - 5TB of home server with shadow drives as well as 'fire safe' external drives.
(Well, I was in software for 30 years and my wife has been running a business form home.)
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daveuprite
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by daveuprite »

Well the thing I was thinking about is this:

https://toptechshifts.com/photostick/gi ... 7hr1u748fl

It's a bloody annoying, very long-winded QVC-style advert but it still looks useful - if it works.
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by phil_h »

Google is your friend:
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/thephotostick.com
90% bad reviews

https://www.amazon.com/ThePhotoStick-Cl ... B01N5XPZ49
362/577 critical reviews

If it sounds too good to be true... it usually is.
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Re: Digital photo recovery device

Post by daveuprite »

Thanks Phil. Yep, I thought that might be the case. The bloody advert alone made me less likely to buy it (which is not what advertising is supposed to do really).

Know of anything similar that works? I like the plug-and-play simplicity of the idea - it just sucks out all the photos - but obviously it has to work. How do you think it does it? Does it just hunt down everything that's .jpeg ?
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