by Grahame Priest


An interesting piece of market research crossed my desk the other day. Sony announced that given the chance to recover one thing from a burning house, most people would choose to recover their family photos. Market research – huh! I wonder what the response would have been if they'd phrased their question like this....

“Ok. Your house is one fire and you're stood outside watching it burn. Are you prepared to risk eyeball-searing heat, smoke damaged lungs and barbecued extremities to rescue the snaps you took of the family wedding last month?”

“No?” Hmmm, what a surprise!

I'm not trying to be unfair to Sony. Just because you can extract virtually any answer you want  by adjusting the phrasing of a question and then asking it in the right way, doesn't mean it isn't a fair point they were making. The simple truth they were highlighting is that, of all the things we possess, our memories, encapsulated as they often are in photographs, are amongst the most precious as well as being the least replaceable.

In these digital days, paper albums stuffed full of family snaps are becoming increasingly rare. It's easy to scan and store old family photos onto a computer drive. It's a much more convenient way to share those memories with others and, once captured, old photos never fade. Digital cameras now outsell the old technology of film by 9 to 1 and it's easy to see why.

But our perception of the risks involved with digitisation haven't moved with the technology. Whereas a house fire may have once posed the biggest threat to the family album, there are a plethora of new threats to our digitised memories which most of us don't even begin to consider, and which await the unprepared with a fateful certainty that vastly exceeds the chances of our houses burning down and our computers being immolated!

Sooner or later, every hard disk fails. While the drive is working, it's exposed on a daily basis to all sorts of risks from possible power spikes to virus attacks. Accidents happen too. In the past, I've reformatted the wrong hard drive, had a computer stolen, had three hard disk failures, and suffered one virus attack which deleted most of my files. Being a keen photographer (and thanks to big thumbs / small controls) I have, on occasion, accidentally deleted the wrong images from my camera media as well as reformatted at least two memory cards without realising it until too late. While I'm in a confessional mood, I'll also put my hand up to admitting I've carelessly lost images during post-processing and, a couple of times,  I've accidentally deleted whole directories of photos. Sounds familiar? Most of us have been there.

In my time as an IT specialist, I've tried most of the leading file recovery software packages, including quite a few dedicated to photo recovery. Despite paying a lot of money licensing various products, I never found one I was happy with. Some would be good at one thing, some at another, but could I find a simple, easy-to-use tool that brought everything together? Hardly. I concluded most products were there just to make money for the developers.

PixFix, on the other hand, resolves many of the issues and shortcomings I've historically found with photo recovery software. Before we take a look at it though, it might be useful to observe exactly what happens to our files and photos when we delete them.

When a photograph is stored on a disk drive (or any other media), the file data is written to physical space on the disk, while information about its name and location is written separately to the file system. When a photo is deleted, it isn't actually physically removed. Instead, the file system entry is marked as 're-usable', and, although the the space on the disk occupied by that photo is also noted as reusable, the deleted image remains untouched and intact until such time as a newer file overwrites the photographic data previously stored there.

This presents a problem for software developers designing photo recovery tools. There's a trade-off between being 'thorough' and being 'fast'. Thorough means reading every part of the drive or media looking for deleted images, while fast means only reading the file table for information on where those images were stored before they were deleted, and then checking those locations. But fast isn't thorough enough to locate every deleted photo, because although the file table information may be overwritten, the deleted photograph itself may still be recoverable. Finding it is the problem, especially if it's on a modern high capacity drive and you'd rather not take all day!

PixFix cracks this issue by automatically running a series of different scans to build a map of the hard drive. First it will read the file table, then it looks for areas containing data not mentioned in the file table, at the same time as finding and mapping-out those parts of the media that have never been used. This means PixFix can usually find deleted photos within a few minutes or, if it hasn't found them, it knows exactly where to take a closer look.

   
Figure 1: scan memory

Automatic is the buzzword here. From the moment the software is downloaded and clicked open, users report being struck by its incredibly straightforward interface. For example, only controls relevant to the current operational state are displayed at any given time, helping to keep things simple. Mouse-over context sensitive advice and information guides the user at all stages. Although there is a 'help' file, the typical user can immediately run and use the software to get their photos back without any difficulty. A great deal of design effort has been applied to keep things intuitively easy without compromising on features.

Typically, hundreds of deleted image file thumbnails will appear within moments, each one accurately  representing exactly how much of the relevant photograph can be recovered, and a separate viewer can be opened to examine recoverable photographs in more detail if necessary.

Users aren't only restricted to recovering these deleted images though. Uniquely for this type of product, images selected can also be permanently erased beyond any chance of recovery. The developers recognised that if someone shares a camera, disposes of a hard disk or even has a computer which others have access to, deleted photos can be often be readily recovered. PixFix addresses this by safely overwriting specific deleted image files a user may wish to securely erase.

Although there are traditional wiping tools which can achieve the same result, these do not show exactly what's recoverable and can only work by filling the entirety of the media with data then removing it, overwriting older data in the process, and is often impractical considering the huge drive capacities common these days.

Whether photographs represent our most precious of memories or our most embarrassing moments, they're certainly amongst our most sensitive files. We don't always want to share them. PixFix delivers a unique and practical solution.

There are a few other aspects to this software which are also unique. For example, this is the only software I've ever seen which asks you if you want to install it on your computer after you've used it! This might seem counter-intuitive but there's a very good reason for this. PixFix has been specifically designed to be run as a portable application because all installation routines create files as they install, and this could compromise  someone's chances of getting their photos back. It makes so much sense, you wonder why other photo or file recovery utilities don't do it. This also means PixFix can be put on a USB device and run against any media or drive on any computer anywhere!

What does PixFix cost? Well, the answer is not a lot! Examine any hard drive and we'll find the vast bulk of photos and images are under 1mb in size. PixFix recovers photos and images under 1mb  completely free of charge and without any nags or time limitations. There's an inexpensive upgrade option if required ($9.95) to enable recovery of images over 1mb. The upgrade also enables the feature to securely erase deleted but recoverable photographs.

So, if your the sort of person who, given the chance to recover one item from a burning house, would consider saving the family photo album, this product is ideal. Actually, if you've got photographs on your computer, a digital camera or even some sort of conjoined 'high-tech' combination of these, PixFix is also ideal!

PixFix can be found on www.download.com or direct from the publishers at www.notsosoftware.com