how long should card recovery take?

[Katherine Rosing]

I installed and ran ZAR to try to recover some important photographs I accidentally deleted. The camera used was a Nikon D80, the card is a512 MB SD card. I am reading the card in a card reader which I think is made by Dynex.

The program has been running for almost 5 hours and currently says: Post Processing, Located: 1 file in 1 directory, the status bar is titled "Current operation and its progress" but the bar looks empty (white)

The volume map is mostly white/grey=nothing interesting, with a few dark squares indicating Data fragments.

There are still approximately 20 files remaining on the card, and I deleted at least 20 which I am trying to recover.

How long is this recovery supposed to take? I am not sure if I did something wrong, because even though I did follow instructions in one of the posts, I still didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do. OR -- is this normal and it just takes a long time?

shouldn't it at least locate the 20 files that I did not delete?

thanks for your suggestions (and thanks for offering the use of this program as a working trial!)

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Yes, it should locate at least 20 files currently on the card.


First of all, I suggest that you retry in simple volume mode.
Close ZAR if still running and reboot (http://www.z-a-recovery.com/reboot.htm) the system.
Start ZAR. On the first screen, click "Proceed" and it will prompt for a processing mode.
Select "Recover files from a simple volume...". In the lower part, select "Recover both "current" files and files normally deleted...". Click "Proceed" for a device list.
Select your card from a device list, then click "Proceed". You have already done it successfully, so I think identifying the card would not be a problem.
One last prompt will appear, for a volume on the card. There will be only one volume entry in the list (and a "Define manually" which you do not need). Select it and click "Proceed" again for a scan.If this does not work, I would then need a sample of a file. Please copy one of the files you did not delete, or some archive shot (preferrably taken with the same settings) and email it to development@z-a-recovery.com
Sometimes subtle variations between camera models may affect the recovery. However, without the sample picture I cannot investigate the problem.