Product Reviews

Oops... and there go your photos. With summer holidays on the horizon, it's all too easy to get over-enthusiastic about clearing out your old memory cards, and once you've trashed those treasured memories of your hols, they're gone for good.

Well, not really. When you delete a file, all you do is remove its entry from the card's table of contents that tells your camera or Mac where

ADVERTISEMENT

to find them. Anyone with the technical know-how can get them back by looking at the card or disk directly, and will charge you handsomely for the service.

As such, a product such as Klix could be as much of a money saver as it is an image saver. We tested it by corrupting a 1GB SD card containing 42 images. After re-mounting it on our Mac, the images were gone, but Klix found them, and 321 others, taken over the course of the previous 12 months by two different cameras.

Cataloguing and recovering them took around 10 minutes and resulted in 814MB of revived files, of which around 90% were perfect. Of the remaining 10%, some were entirely grey, some were half-recovered but missing significant portions, and one looked like a bizarre montage where people's faces and a brick wall behind them were visible, but their bodies had disappeared.

Klix can save a lot of heartache, and is almost worth having in reserve just in case the unthinkable should happen.