I must admit that in our household, we call this game not Wingspan, but a Game of F***s. Most of the cards are referred to as Little Sh**s or Useless F***s, because they don't help the current goals. But some birds are totally awesome like the Wedge-tailed Eagle, Great-horned owl, Puffin, Little Penguin, and the Black Noddy. Worth loads of points, these birds also look gorgeous on the board.

Having played so many games, we've developed "House Rules" including:

1. If you get the Spangled Drongo, you must call out "Spangled Drongo!" loudly using your best Ocker accent. What a name for a bird!

5. And finally, for those with the Oceania expansion pack, one of the round goals is "No goal" which we think sucks because it decreases the total points achievable. [Updated July 2022 - the kind people on the Wingspan Facebook group let me know that I've been play "No goal" all wrong LOL - but our house rule is still fun to play regardless]. Instead, we have a house-rule that it's for "NZ birds played" but as you will have likely guessed we call it the "NZ F***ks" round. We use NZ Birds Online as the adjudicator as to whether the bird is "NZ" or not, and refer to looking up a bird as "Consulting Colin" after Colin Miskelly, who created this amazing resource. It's turned into our favourite round goal. It's fascinating to see how many vagrants we get (did you know NZ has kookaburras?).

I can't wait for the next expansion pack to come out - yes I'm addicted!
​
Do you play Wingspan? Do you agree it's the best game ever? Do you have some fun house rules too?

P.S. This is not a paid or solicited review, I'm just a dedicated fan.

The DCIM (camera folder) had subfolders, one of which had RW2 (Panasonic) raw files. The preview wasn’t able to show me an image of this old format, but I chose the first image to recover. I saved it to my desktop and was glad to see the entire folder structure was written and not just the file. Win10 could preview the image, and I was delighted to see it was a photo of a baby kākā! Awwwww cute!

Curious as to what a Deep Scan might reveal, I tried that. A Deep Scan does take significantly longer to run, but a progress dial manages expectations. This time 43 files were found in 14 folders. A new folder was created on the card called “Raw Data.” In this folder, the files are grouped into subfolders by file type, not in their original folders. Why is that? Well, if the original folder structure was still readable, it would have been picked up by the Initial Scan. Without the index, all the data recovery software can do is recover the individual files. What is curious is that it found files it labeled as *.RAW from the old Panasonic camera and could preview them. Perhaps it just didn’t know that RW2 files are RAWs? 

The four RAW files it found had wildly different sizes. Two were 4GB, and two were 20MB. I’m guessing the two 4GB files were missing end-of-file markers because they were partially overwritten. The JPG preview in the RAW file was still viewable. Conveniently, these files are named by the camera type and image dimensions, e.g., “Panasonic DMC-FZ100-4536x2448-9029440.RAW”. The smaller files were recoverable, but the larger ones took forever (and to be honest, I got bored after 10 minutes and stopped the recovery). I also tried deep recovery of a WMV (not readable) and a PDF (recovered without error). Deep recovery is not guaranteed even if a file is recognized because it may be partly overwritten by other data.

I then tried one of my current 64 GB SD cards, which regularly gets reformatted by my Sony a7riii camera and currently has multiple photoshoots saved. The card was less than a third full, so there was plenty of “empty” disk to find previously deleted photos. The Stellar file preview could display the Sony ARW images, which was handy. The initial scan showed the expected available, undeleted folders and one deleted folder, which was empty.  So I entered Deep Scan. Curiously, the deep scan did not find the photos prior to formatting as I expected. A card reformat doesn’t delete the files; it merely rewrites the index, so there should have been files there to be found. It seems there is something about the Sony reformat that Stellar doesn’t recognize? This is obviously an issue for a product aimed at photographers. Who among us hasn’t inadvertently reformatted a card before downloading the images?

I did not have a corrupted disk to test, but I hope recovering photos from reformatted SD cards is a fair test. It certainly worked fine for the card from my Panasonic GX8. But there is an issue with Sony-formatted cards that Stellar might want to look into, given Sony cameras’ rising popularity.
 
I hope you never need to use data recovery software, but Stellar is worth a look if you do. Stellar offers a free trial, so if you find that it doesn’t work for your situation, you won’t be out of pocket. When it does work, it works well and is intuitive and straightforward to use.

Have you ever had a corrupted disk and had to use data recovery software? How did you fare and what did you use? Let us know in the comments... 
 
Reviewed: Stellar Data Recovery Standard
Platform: Windows 10