Remember having to choose between 24 and 36 images to a roll of film? With compact flash, SD/MMC, and other media cards used in modern digital cameras pushing upwards of 4GB, anything less than a few hundred or even thousands of images seems absolutely crippling. But with any magnetic storage device, it's not a question of if the media will fail, but when, and these cards are no exception.

But what do you do when you haven't emptied your card into iPhoto or your favorite image cataloging application for months, and when you finally get to it, a number of the images (or even all of them) are corrupted? Have you lost all of those memories? Do you need to reformat the card and start over? No. You have a couple options. You could take the card to a drive recovery specialist like our friends over at DriveRescue and pay a lot of money for recovery. Or, you could pay $30 for a copy of Klix from JoeSoft.

The software works very simply. Using your camera or card reader (I recommend a card reader to save your camera batteries) via USB or FireWire (AKA IEEE 1394 or iLink), connect to your Mac or PC. Launch Klix. It recognizes your card, and if you have more than one connected, it'll give you a choice via a popup menu. Click on the Recover button, and it scans the card for images and movies. Go on with whatever you were doing before, and depending on the size of your card, several minutes later, you'll get a preview of all the images on the card. Choose some or all of the images from their thumbnails, and drag and drop or save them wherever you want them.

We happened to have 2 compact flash cards from our digital camera, both of which had corrupt images on them. In fact, an entire trip across the country was on the line with one of these cards. How did Klix fare? As far as we can tell, every image was restored and saved perfectly except 1, which seems to have been overwritten. (But speaking of overwriting, we got one of the cards used with the camera on ebay. When we restored the images, we found images from the family that previously owned the card, and while we simply erased them, let this be a warning to you: don't sell or give away old memory cards if they might have personal data on them--it's recoverable. Same goes for hard drives. In this case, they were just vacation shots, not anything personal, but it could have been. We could even tell that, though they sold us the card with a Canon camera, the photos and movies were taken with a Nikon.)

After restoring the images, we reformatted a card, since Klix claims to be able to recover even if all has been lost through an accidental reformat. After reformatting a card, we could still recover 244 out of 246 images and movies.

The software does have a few quirks. We found that it for some reason runs 2 applications with the same name and icon at once. While not a significant problem, it will confuse users and tarnishes a nearly perfect application just a bit. A better preview besides the tiny thumbnails would be helpful, and an actual progress bar instead of just "Busy recovering to (path location)" would be nice but not completely necessary. A "New Folder" button in the save dialog should also be there and was mysteriously missing. We had to quit after each restore in order to use the next card. It wouldn't autodetect the new one when mounted.