Recovered Materials...

I had a accident last night after coming back from the Exploratorium. Not a big one mind you, just a little one. With my camera. I had been taking pictures all night at the Reconsidered Materials exhibit, so I had left the camera on. When I got home, the first thing I wanted to see was all the pictures that I captured on film, so I opened the compartment for the memory card... and guess what? The camera was still on.
Don't ask me why, but Canon cameras have this thing where if you do this, you lose any images still in the buffer.
As soon as I remembered this just as i was opening the compartment, and quickly turned off the camera. Then I popped it into my Flash Card Reader. The Flash Card reader showed that the images were there, sort of. They were in a state of limbo really, the data was there, but I couldn't do anything with that data -- couldn't copy it, and mac os wouldn't let me view the pictures. So I inserted it back into the camera.
Big mistake.
The camera, seeing no image data, made a new directory to store images in. Viewing through the camera showed no images. Re-inserting it into the computer showed that the card was blank.
All my pictures of Jell-O, gone. Lost to user error. Or so I thought. I remembered that my memory card had come included with it a program called ImageRescue, which purportedly could undelete images on a memory card. So I installed it and fired it up. No go. It couldn't even find the card, even though both the reader and the card were Lexar.
So, enter PhotoRescue. This image recovery program is what I term mercenaryware. The trial version will do all the work, but will refuse to output files until it is paid for. This is not bad for data recovery -- it at least shows that it's capable of doing the task at hand. It even comes with a money back guarantee.
My verdict? One of the best $29 I've ever spent. It recovered every single shot I took that night (as well as shots I had taken months ago). While I don't intend on making this mistake again, it's good to know that it's there if it does happen again.