How to Recover Contents of Compact Flash (CF) Card

What's a Compact Flash card?

Typically uses flash memory in a standardized enclosure, the Compact Flash (CF) card is a popular mass storage device format used in a variety of portable electronic equipments, such as cameras, camcorders, DSLRs, game devices, music players, etc. to store photos, videos, audio files and other multimedia files safely and to make their portability easier.

How to recover CF card contents deleted, formatted or lost?

• Accidental deletion
• Pressing the reformat button in camera
• Various reasons of damage like low battery power, turning off on writing/reading, etc.
• And so forth

You may have lost your vital photos, videos and audio files from a CF card due to any reason above. As a matter of fact, the files are not completely erased from the CF card on the deletion or formatting. Only files names and properties are erased, the file content is still hanging around and recoverable. All you need is to get a CF (Compact Flash) card recovery tool, which can help to retrieve all the contents. Wondershare Photo Recovery is one of that. Before acting, keep in mind that less operation on the CF card gives you higher chances to get lost files back.

Step 1. Connect your CF card to PC

Connect your CF card to the computer through proper adapters or the device directly. Then run the program and click "Start" to begin the CF card recovery work.

Step 2. Select the CF path for recovery

The program can detects all drives connected to the computer. If you didn't find the drive you are planning to recover, please "Refresh Drives". Then select the one where you are going to recover files and hit "Scan".

If you don't want to recover all the content from the CF card, you can set the file type by clicking "Filter Options". Then choose photo, audio or video from the "File Type", and even the specific file formats, if you have a requirement. Then continue the work via "Scan".

Step 3. Recover CF card

After the complete scan, all the files found back are well listed in the scan result panel. Check the folders of audio, video and photo on the left, and then hit “Recover” to get them all back. Remember to save them on your computer or other storage devices, but not the same CF card from which you lost them before due to safety of the file.

Note: As to photos, you can preview them before you execute the recovery. During the preview, you can check the quality of them and decide which one to recover. If you are a Mac user, please try Photo Recovery for Mac here to do Compact Flash data recovery.