Review: Lexar Image Rescue 3 data recovery

Recover your accidentally deleted photos with ease

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Price: £24.99

Manufacturer: Lexar

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Verdict

Pros: Slick interface; powerful recovery facilities; works with movie and audio files; card test and formatting/secure erase functions
Cons: Limited number of file types supported; will only read flash memory cards
Overall: This surprisingly powerful utility is an excellent buy for photographers. With more extensive storage media and file support, it would appeal to all computer users

Karl Foster, Personal Computer World 13 Mar 2007

Digital camera menus are such that it’s common to find Delete Frame sat next to Delete All Frames, or Format Card, hence catastrophic data loss is often a button-press away.

There are plenty of data recovery utilities on the market, many aimed at rescuing the content of scuppered hard drives, but Lexar’s Image Rescue specialises in recovering media files from flash memory.

This latest version not only tracks down deleted Jpeg, Tiff and Raw files, but it also extends to wayward Wav, mp3 and movie files, making it of interest to those with card-loaded portable media players as well as to photographers.

Image Rescue takes about 10 minutes to disgorge the hidden content of a 2GB Compactflash card - which in our tests was a much-abused, formatted and re-formatted Lexar Professional 80x card.

The results were surprising. Files long overwritten were hauled from the card’s cells. In fact, we’d forgotten about some of the images that the program rustled up for saving to disk or for burning, such was their antiquity.

The wizard-based approach of the Image Recovery section makes the procedure simple and it’s a revelation to see the extent of what can be reconstituted.

The obvious next step in our testing was to head for the Advanced Tools to format the card and then see if Image Recovery could find anything. Which it did - everything from the initial recovery, in fact.

Thankfully, for those aiming to keep files from prying eyes, there’s the means to securely erase the card.

Image Rescue also works with Secure Digital cards. And, should you buy certain Pro and Premium SD/CF cards, including the latest 300x Professional UDMA CF, it’s free. Not a bad price for such impressive software.

If it could be pointed at hard drives and other devices, rather than just cards, and be configured to recover any file, Lexar would have something inordinately tasty on offer. As it is, Image Rescue 3 is a great buy for anyone relying on flash-memory storage of photo, audio and movie files.

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