Camera RAW Recovery

A RAW file is not one thing. It bundles the camera's sensor data together with a full-size JPEG preview, some metadata, and a thumbnail, all in a container that varies by manufacturer. Canon writes CR2 and the newer CR3, Nikon writes NEF, Sony ARW, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2, Fujifilm RAF, and Adobe DNG is the common format many cameras and converters share. Refindo recognises each one by its content signature, not its name, so a carved file still gets the right extension even after the original file name is gone.

That embedded preview is the part that makes RAW recovery practical. Because every RAW carries a JPEG of the shot near the front of the file, Refindo can show you the picture without decoding the sensor data, which is slow and format-specific. You get to see what a file actually is before recovering it, the same way you preview an ordinary photo. The flip side is size: a single RAW can run from 15 MB to well over 60 MB, which matters for how they fragment.

The format on the card depends on the camera, and Refindo handles the ones photographers actually shoot. Canon bodies write CR2 on older DSLRs and CR3 on the newer mirrorless lineup, Nikon writes NEF, Sony writes ARW, Olympus and OM System write ORF, Panasonic Lumix writes RW2, and Fujifilm writes RAF. Adobe DNG sits across all of them, the open format some cameras shoot directly and a lot of photographers convert to for archiving. Every one of these is found by reading its signature off the media, so a Canon CR3 comes back as a CR3 and a Sony ARW as an ARW even when the original file name is gone.

The recovery itself doesn't change much from one brand to the next, but a couple of details are worth knowing. CR3 is built on the same ISO container as the HEIC and MP4 a modern phone shoots, so Refindo reads its real structure instead of guessing at the size. Panasonic RW2 is the awkward one, since it doesn't store its own length in a way carving can read; on a deep scan its size is worked out from where the raw data begins and where the next file starts. The practical result is that all seven formats recover and all seven preview, and the cleanest results come from a card that hasn't been shot to since the files went missing.

When the card's directory is intact, a RAW file comes back whole because the file system still knows exactly where it begins and ends. The harder case is a card that was filled, partly cleared, and shot to again. A big RAW can end up split across separated areas of the card, and once the file is deleted the record of where those pieces live can be lost. Recovery then follows the first run cleanly and may not find the rest, so the file opens but the later part is wrong.

There's a small mercy built into the format. The embedded JPEG preview sits near the start of the file, so it usually survives even when the full-resolution sensor data did not all come back. That means you can still see the shot, recover the preview, and know what you lost, even in the cases where the complete RAW could not be reassembled. The honest way to sort the clean recoveries from the partial ones is to preview the frames you care about and check their file size before you restore a whole card.