How to Recover RAW Files from a CF Card

Whether it’s the latest CFexpress card or the older CF card, photographers consider them a safe bet to store high-resolution large-sized RAW photos. Used in modern cameras, they are expensive, fast, and durable. Nonetheless, if not handled with care, you can lose camera RAW files from CF cards. Camera compact flash cards can become unreadable, develop bad sectors, get corrupted, and damaged. All this can eventually lead to the loss of stored photos on it. Here, you will learn how to recover RAW files from CF cards, be it Kingston, Lexar, SanDisk, or others.

Why do you lose RAW photos from compact flash cards?

Camera compact flash cards are vulnerable. Like any other storage media, you can lose RAW files on it due to accidental deletion, formatting, virus infection, physical damage, etc. Your CF card can also get corrupt if used on multiple devices or connected to a computer that doesn’t have an antivirus installed.

Further, if you keep taking pictures, even when the CF card is full, it will not save the photos and result in the loss of the existing ones.

You can also lose photos due to improper transferring or copying of RAW files to computers or other devices. Besides, photo loss may also happen due to accidental formatting and deletion without taking a backup or saving the data on another drive.

How to Recover RAW Photos from CF Card?

Backup is the best way to recover lost RAW files of CF cards. But if you don’t find your photos in the backup, trust professional photo recovery software. It supports RAW file recovery from all kinds of compact flash cards. A CF card data recovery software can scan and find deleted or missing RAW files in various data loss situations.

Just make sure you don’t use the CF card further to prevent overwriting. If you continue to use your camera card after data loss, it will permanently erase the deleted RAW files from it.  Even an advanced photo recovery tool won’t be of help.

Method 1: Recover RAW photos from your backup drive

Check and recover your lost photos from the backup folder you might have created on the computer, external drive, or cloud storage.

Backups can protect you from terrible photo loss situations. Nevertheless, if you don’t have a backup, trust the CF card recovery software to recover RAW files from digital cameras.

Method 2: Use the best RAW photo recovery software for CF card

RAW files are uncompressed files of large size. For photographers, it’s crucial to recover them in their original state. Hence, always choose a professional RAW files recovery solution. It ensures you recover deleted photos securely from any camera CF card.

Here we recommend Stellar Photo Recovery software — a capable tool for CR2, CR3, SR2, DNG, ERF, RAF, NEF, K25, ORF, and other RAW file formats recovery from CF cards of all capacities.

The software is quick, efficient, and user-friendly. It can recover RAW partitions and your lost RAW files from Fuji, Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Sony, or any other digital camera. In addition, you can quickly scan and retrieve photos from formatted, virus-infected, and corrupt CF cards of SanDisk, Transcend, Toshiba, Sony, etc.

Moreover, the software displays the recovered RAW photos with the actual file names and timestamps. This is quite helpful in organizing the huge number of files after recovery. Further, you can choose the RAW file format to restore only the required file types and avoid the recovery of unnecessary photos.

You need to simply download the CF card recovery tool on your Windows or Mac computer. Scan the camera CF card, preview, and save the found RAW photos. The software also has a professional version of Stellar Photo Recovery that can repair damaged JPEG, RAW, and other files from DSLRs, camcorders, etc.

Steps to Recover Deleted RAW photos from CF Card 

• Download Stellar Photo Recovery on your computer.
• Connect the CF card to your computer.
• Launch the software, select the CF card drive letter, and click Scan.

• Navigate to the Advanced Settings icon on top to select your camera RAW file format to recover only the required RAW pictures.

• Preview the found images files and click Recover.

Don’ts to protect RAW photos from loss

• Don’t remove the CF card from the camera when in use.
• Don’t save the photos on the CF card when it’s full.
• Don’t connect the camera CF card to a computer that has no antivirus.
• Don’t forget to take multiple backups of your camera photos.

Conclusion

RAW photo loss from CF cards is common. Get a professional CF card RAW files recovery software like Stellar Photo Recovery. It can recoup your high-quality pictures shot in RAW format from all types of cameras. The popularly used software has proved to be a savior for millions of users on the verge of losing their camera RAW photos from CF cards.

You can take the free trial of the software anytime to check its effectiveness in your CF card photo loss situation.

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About The Author

Nishat Paiker

Nishat Paiker is an expert technical writer and editor with over 8 years of experience. She has deep knowledge about data recovery and loves to explore new technology and DIY tools. Nishat has keen interest in photography. You will often find her giving photography tips and hacks.