A story worth sharing. A good friend and professional photographer was visiting us in early May. He'd had a productive day of shooting, but in one of our multi-topic conversations taking place during a multi-tasking moment, he inadvertently REFORMATTED his flash drive before downloading the images. It happens to the best of us... and he IS one of the best of us.

Once he had regained his breath, I told him my own experience saving images with SanDisk's Rescue Pro. As soon as we returned to the house, we sat down with the computer and the reformatted drive to see if, indeed, recovering images under these conditions was possible. It worked.

The software also worked for me when I was shooting in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year and my flash drive had corrupted. The software wasn't installed on Betsy's laptop, which is the one we had traveled with. Fortunately, the electricity stayed on during the two hours it took to download the software using the molasses-slow Internet connection at the guest house where we were staying. It was well-worth the two-hour heart-wrenching wait for the download!

This and other data recovery utilities like Lexar's Image Rescue work with any brand drive.

When I searched for the links above, I ran across an older article with still pertinent advice in Business Week, of all places. Lots of good advice there.