Recover Canon RAW .cr2 files from corrupt SD card

Yesterday I put my SD card into my laptop and was confronted with a rather scary 'errors have have been found on your disk' type message followed by a check disk which proceeded to crash and the files and folders on my SD card were turned into porridge.

Fighting the panic I thought to myself, I am a resourceful and reasonably knowledgeable person, let's get these back...! And so I entered the world of file recovery programs. After a few downloads/installs it quickly became apparent that JPG files and standard file formats are pretty easy to recover, however .CR2 files (or Canon RAW) are not that widely known to file recovery programs. From my vague understanding the software needs to look for the wrappers for different file types but if it doesn't know the file type it won't find it.

Anyway, after a rather long and slightly worrying morning I finally found Recover Plus Photo Recovery (snappy...). It isn't pretty, it takes a while, BUT it does what it says and for me it got back everything, about 7GB of a mixture of JPG/.CR2/.AVI and other odds and ends that were on the card including a number of photos I had deleted a long time ago. The great thing is that before spending any money (yes, it is ~$35) that you can see previews of the files it has found. This is great as you know you're not going to waste your money!

This has brought home how important it is to go for posh, shiny SD cards as the ones I bought were relatively cheap Transcend ones. I will be getting a couple of SanDisk Exteme Pro cards to replace the ones I have as I don't want to risk corruption again... (I had a 16GB card just die completely on me not that long ago, again a cheap card...).