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The recovery tools wanted $89 to save my daughters photos, so I built my own app

He deleted his daughters photos from an SD card, and every Mac recovery tool he found would scan for free but charged $89 a year or $130 to $200 to actually save anything. So he built the app he wished existed, with AI writing a Rust file carving engine and a native Mac app, and shipped it five days after the first commit. It is now a paid app of its own, $29 once, no subscription.

How it works

  1. Delete the photos by accident
  2. Find that recovery tools charge $89 a year or more to save files
  3. Build his own with AI: a Rust engine that images the card and carves files, plus a native Mac interface
  4. Make it work only on a copy so the card is never written to
  5. Make it say within seconds whether anything is left, instead of letting people hope for hours
  6. Sign, notarize and release it in five days

Why it’s worth knowing

The hard part was not recovering files. It was making the app admit fast when nothing is left, instead of selling false hope.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on reddit.com. See the original ↗

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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.