The program can be purchased and downloaded on-line, or ordered on CD-ROM together with a full-colour, installation and user manual. The instructions in the latter are clear and precise, and require just ten pages in a miniature handbook, that includes detailed screenshots illustrating the various steps in the file recovery process and the associated options.

The software is very versatile and can be used on any media, including digital camera memory cards, USB memory keys, and even computer hard drives! Installation is quick and easy. Running the program produces a simple menu panel with the main program controls and a number of optional command icons.

The basic file recovery option merely requires selecting the drive letter of the memory card from a drop-down list, and pressing the “Recover lost files” button. The program goes into a turbo-scan mode, displays a preview of each image as it is retrieved, and lists the total number of files that have been recovered. If you don't think that all of the files have been successfully recovered, there is a further option to run a deep-scan mode.

The program will let you view the recovered files and builds a set of thumbnails for display in an on-screen viewer. While the program will recover all types of files, only image files can be displayed in the thumbnail viewer. For other recovered items, a number of icons are used to denote various types of sound, movie and data files.

By default, the recovered files are stored in My Documents\My Recovered Files\ in the sub-directories TurboScan and DeepScan; however, the output directory can be customized through one of the program's options. Additional options allow you to burn the recovered files to a CD, or to clear the directory of recovered files prior to re-running the program. There is also an option to securely erase a memory card by writing zeros to every location.

Since the deep-scanning process is very thorough, and because the program can be run on large hard drives, one of the options allows you to limit the types of files that are to be recovered so that, for example, only .JPG images would be retrieved.

Another option allows you to backup a memory card by taking a snapshot of its contents, this being stored as a .IR3 file in the Program Files\FlashFixers\ImageRecall 3\ directory. An associated option allows this file to be written back to the memory card so restoring the card's contents. The user's manual suggests that this would allow the card to be reformatted for immediate further use, with file recovery to be conducted at a later time.

The software can be purchased on-line from the FlashFixers' web site; however, an even better offer is to download the free trial version. The latter is a fully-functional version of the program with the limitation that it will only recover the first ten images from a memory card. Purchasing the full version allows unlimited image and data recoveries. And, if this still doesn't work, FlashFixers offer their extensive laboratory recovery services, and will discount the cost by the price of the software.

Bottom Line:

ImageRecall3 (Proprietary, US$ 39.95)
FlashFixers LLC
http://www.flashfixers.com/