How to recover sony ARW files deleted by Aperture after importing?

Yes, change your workflow. You should not have Aperture or any other program delete the images from the card or computer. Verify the import and then manually delete or re-format.

Card/Camera deletion is different than Finder "Move to Trash", because the whole point is to reclaim space on the card. In the finder you (should!) have the luxury of a lot of extra hard drive space, so keeping deleted files in the trash for a while is not a big deal.

Your only solution is the recovery software.

The best result was from Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery software, which recognizes those deleted ARW files as NEF files but the size of each photo is only 32KB (it shows the photo in its preview).

Have you tried to use the Recovery Software on your harddrive? Or have you completely wiped the drive when you carbone cloned in the wrong direction?

When you clone one drive (the source) onto another (the destination) the destination drive is for all intents and purposes erased and formatted by the cloning operation before the data from the source is copied onto it.

So unless you are willing to spend a good deal of money sending the drive out to a recovery company and even then the results will probably not be good, forget about trying to recover from the HD.

You'll stand a better chance of trying to get them off the cards.

Sorry the news isn;t better,

regards

Sounds like the Sony is doing some deep level of erase/format when you delete an image from the card.

You might have better luck attacking this from the Sony end. See if you can find any information, either from Sony or the web, that discusses the way Sony is erasing the images and if anyone has had success retrieving them.

Recovering the images from the card is really not an Aperture issue. When Aperture deletes images from a card installed in a camera Aperture basically gives the erase/delete command to the camera and the camera does the operation. You need to figure out what Sony is doing.

good luck

regards

Could be a card reader (not the camera).

True and that would change things but this from the OP's last post

I tested with Stellar on a new card. I shot some ARW photos and format the card on my NEX 6 camera, then try to recover them with Stellar.

Seems to indicate, in the test at least, the card was erased/formatted in the camera.

Have you tried doing a search for recover sony arw files from card (or something similar) in Google?

Seems to be a number of products and suggestions out there.

Message was edited by: Frank Caggiano - After looking at few hits from that search it seems a lot of folk say stellar didn't work but a program called REMO did.

See Recover Sony ARW files - Remo Software

ARW is a general format name for Sony raw files. Each Sony camera has its own ARW format.

Unfortunately if both of those programs failed to recover your files you may have to come to accept the fact that they are gone for good unless you want to enlist the services of a professional data recovery service.

regards