A friend of mine came to me for help. She accidentally deleted all photos from her camera SD card. And she needed help to restore them.

This is quite typical scenario. Clearly you cannot repair much, but there’re tools, which can help you to restore as much as possible.

Restoration (Restoration @ Software Informer) is one of these tools. Unfortunately, the product seems a bit “abandoned” (last update was to make it compatible with Win2k 🙂 ), but it works on my Windows 8.1 Pro.

Restoration works quite well. It works on “full drive level”, i.e. it scans the whole drive for deleted files (you can set a filter), and then offers you to restore them by copying, i.e. to copy the (current) contents of the deleted file to another location, where you can review if the file has been restored OK.

In the “restore pictures from SD card” scenario, it worked quite well. It scanned the SD card, and I just asked it to copy all discovered files to my hard drive. Then I was able to clear the invalid JPG files and I delivered her the files, which were good.

Restoration is also delivered as a ZIP file, which you can run from any folder. It immediately went to my “Programs” folder, together with PortableApps, and as far as it works on the OS (Windows 10, we will see…), I’ll keep it handy!