z-a=ZAR - Data recovery software at $(US)49.95 (unless all you want is photos)
recuva=portable
z-a= nope
recuva and z-a both will show many files and may even show them as recoverable. end product file is a different story. That said I use recuva with great regualrity and (when faced with a dead drive or what not) use a paid recovery program (Runtime software's getdataback)
Recuva seems to be able to find a good amount of deleted stuff, but I can't get it to work on my system. Every time it starts recovering, Windows comes up with a screen that says Recuva has stopped working and makes me shut it down. But I will say Recuva seems like a very nice product even though I can't use it.
Since I'm always interested in looking for the best recovery software I tried the ZAR demo. Trying to do a scan of an SD card ZAR froze up my system and I had to do a hard shutdown.
"Better" may very well be an assumption. Especially if one tool recovers something another misses, and I think it's really all up to how lucky you are being able to get a irreplaceable file restored that's still actually usable.
"Better" may very well be an assumption. Especially if one tool recovers something another misses, and I think it's really all up to how lucky you are being able to get a irreplaceable file restored that's still actually usable.
What I've found in my few tests is that DESPITE a lot of bells and whistles that some of these expensive recovery programs have, not all these features actually perform some useful purpose. The only indicator that matters is what files can be identified and recovered intact. Now so far Recuva is the best of the 3-4 I've tested... one so bad I didn't even mention it. Migo seems to have a demo up for an ancient product instead of their best one. But there are other circumstances besides simply deleting files from an SD card where all these bells and whistles DO perform some useful function. Time will tell.