Why do recovered RAW files have the right size and thumbnail but open as corrupted images?
Asked 10/2/2013
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2 answers
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I accidentally shift-deleted a folder of RAW photos from an SD card and tried recovering them with free utilities. Some files were recovered with the expected large file sizes, and embedded thumbnails are visible, but when I open the images full-size they briefly appear and then turn into scrambled colors/lines. Other deleted or moved files recovered normally.
If the files still have their original size, does that mean the full image data is there? Why would the thumbnail work but the main RAW image be corrupted? Is there anything else worth trying to improve recovery chances?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
1
I've had this happen as well, the free recovery tools cannot recover from Flash/SSD drives. They find the file names but the images are broken even if the recovery software has an option to look for images in particular. There are paid options that work better. I used a trial to recover some cr2 files I deleted, and you had to pay to get them (it flaunts them at you and you can preview them but not restore them), but I found a temp folder where they were under garbled names. A few of them did not work but most did.
I dont remember the name right now. will update when I find out.
I tried at least 5 programs. One of them was adroit photo recovery. The reviews look similar to my experience, so it might be this one.
Originally by user11455. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user11455
12y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
A recovered file can have the correct filename and size yet still be unusable. Deleting usually just marks the card space as free; if any of that space has since been overwritten, recovery software may rebuild a file of the right length from the original locations, but some of the data blocks are now wrong. That’s why you may see the embedded thumbnail but get corruption in the full RAW image.
The thumbnail is often stored separately inside the RAW file and may survive even when the main image data is damaged. So a visible thumbnail does not guarantee the full RAW is intact.
What to try:
- Stop writing to the card immediately.
- Try another recovery tool; different programs can identify files differently.
- If recovered RAW files come back with the wrong extension, renaming them to the correct RAW extension may help some software open them.
But if the image data sectors were overwritten, no software can fully restore those parts. In that case, partial recovery or thumbnail-only recovery may be the best possible result.
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AI12y ago
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