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Article Title: Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR) 8.0 - Digital Image Recovery Review

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: Software Articles
Times Read: 4013
Date: 2007-01-01 20:46:23
Pages: 1

One of my professors from Camosun College used to say "There are two types of people those who have had a hard drive crash, and those that it will happen to one day." And I couldn't agree more with this statement. Now luckily Flash Memory such as Compact Flash, Secure Digital (SD), xD, Memory Stick and others are considerably more reliable as there are no moving parts enclosed, but it still does happen.

In the last year I have had one Memory Card die (I believe it shorted out, the card could not even be read after - GTX 1Gb SD), one external photobank / external hard drive have its partition go corrupt after a week long trip (Photo Gallery), and my Aunt's photos from her trip to Australia. Let me tell you from experience that when you think you have lost a week worth of photos you tend to get worked up pretty quick.

After trying a few pieces of software to restore my Mediasonic HM1 I came across Zero Assumption Recovery. It was simple to use, and managed to restore the majority of the photos. To me this was remarkable when looking at a directory listing as all the files appeared as ASCII names. This software also managed to restore every photo from my aunts trip except for two out of over five hundred.

Note there are 230 objects that total 32.8gb on a 512mb card?!

Zero Assumption Recovery 8.0 supports digital photo recovery for the following file formats:

GIF
JPEG
TIFF
CRW - Canon RAW data
MOV - QuickTime movie
WAV - Waveform audio
CR2 - Canon CR2 RAW format

Zero Assumption Recovery - Selecte files to Recover

List of JPEGs to restore

Supported Filesystems:

FAT16 (Used in Windows 95) and FAT32 (used in Windows 95 OSR2, 98, ME, 2000 and XP)
NTFS versions 1.2 (Windows NT 4.0), 3.0 (Windows 2000), and 3.1 (Windows XP/2003)
Limited ext2 (Linux filesystem) support
Digital image recovery function operates regardless of the filesystem type

Zero Assumption Recovery - Analyzing Filesystem

ZAR 8.0 analyzes partitions on a low level to help recovery your data

Supported RAID layouts:

Hardware RAID0 and RAID5 with any number of member disks.
It is possible to recover Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 server software RAID0 and RAID5 if the RAID members occupy the entire physical disk.

Now recovering data with ZAR 8.0 is a snap if you just follow these simple directions:

Download, install, then run ZAR 8.0 (click here for zar80setup.exe).
Attach the camera or insert the memory card into the reader device.
On the first screen, no adjustment is required, just hit "Proceed".
Program will then prompt you for an operation mode. Select "Recover images from camera memory card", then hit "Proceed".
Select your camera from the list of the attached devices. You can identify the camera by its media size or by the model name (if available).
The rest is mostly automatic. When the analysis is done, select files to recover, specify the directory to place recovered files to, hit "Start copying" and you're done.

The best feature of ZAR 8.0 is that the Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery is free! ZAR 8.0 itself costs $79.95, but you can do image recovery in trial mode indefinitely. The limitations of the trial are:

Only (up to) four directories can be recovered in the demo version of our computer data recovery software. (excludes Digital Image Recovery).
The demo version is unable to load the scan result file. However, it does save these files to avoid having to rescan the disk when you got the full version.
In digital image recovery mode program operates as freeware with no functional limitations. List of known compatible digital camera models and image formats is available Known camera compatibility list here.