I've been spending an ungodly amount of money on memory cards lately, namely 1066x Compact Flash cards. Last few purchases I've decided to go with Lexar instead of San Disk, and so far I haven't been let down. One nicety they throw in with their Professional cards is access to their image recovery software. You download the trial from their website and enter a code written on a slip thrown in with the card. This has sat for months unused but today when my spastic fingers got ahead of me and I wound up deleting the keepers and saving the junkers from an import and of course I had to format the card before doing such a silly thing. It wouldn't have been the end of the world--just some photos from a youth event at church I shoot a few times a month and could reshoot later on down the road. Nevertheless I decided to give the recovery software a spin and was amazed at how it not only recovered the images I just shot and then formatted away, but even previous images that have been formatted over several times
In other good news: my Primos trail camera this spring had the batteries die in it and it seems as though the camera decided with the last ounce of juice to format the card before shutting off.

I had set the card aside thinking I might be able to do something like this and lo and behold, the software even recovers files from San Disk as well

I suppose I'll get to see which bulls survived after all