I accidentally stuck the wrong SD card into my camera and formatted it. Is there any good (and preferably free) way to recover the files? (It’s 256GB of data that I hadn’t backed up yet. I had processed and uploaded most of the videos but only about half the images that I wanted to get out of it, and there’s probably a good month’s worth of images I hadn’t gotten around to yet.)
Just doing a quick web search, it seems like that the way cameras format disks, it’s unlikely that files can be recovered at this point, but I thought maybe some of you all might have run into this situation and might have more insight into whether it’s possible to recover files.
(It’s a little bit of a bummer, but it’s probably no great loss. If it’s going to cost more than a few dollars or a few hours, it’s probably not worth it to me to try to recover.)
I have no experience doing this other than hearing that it is technically possible and reading stories that specialists like the FBI can do it. I have heard that it is definitely possible though - from what I understand, as long as you just formatted the card, and haven’t actually gone back to write anything else yet, the data is likely still there, just with all the directory info deleted. There do seem to be programs that will do recovery for you, but most of them cost something. This one (https://www.cleverfiles.com/memory-card-data-recovery.html) seems to have a fair amount of recommendations and will do 500 mb for free, so you could give it a shot as a test to see if it’s worth pursuing something else (or at least get a subset of the photos back).
I often worry about this happening to me (even though it hasn’t…yet). Hope someone has some good suggestions! I’m sure this has happened to others.
Various (free) tools can allow recovery attempts. The first step is to remove the SDCard from the device, write-protect it, and only then start recovery (using a true SDCard reader).
Depending on your Operating System, the type of camera files you’d like to recover (raw, jpg, movies…), and your computer skills proficiency, you should get different suggestions.
i ended up using R-Photo to try to recover the files, and it seems to have recovered about half my photos (complete with original file names and metadata) entirely and maybe another 10 or 20 percent partially.
probably only 1 percent of my videos have been recovered fully though. most of them have only static as audio and just a black screen, although the create dates and video lengths are visible.
i’m now trying to use PhotoRec to to see if it might be more successful in recovering the videos specifically, but early signs are not promising, and it seems like a long shot that one program would be much more successful than the other.
it seems like videos are just less likely to be recoverable, unfortunately.
I have a slightly different, though perhaps related problem. My old SD card is still perfectly good, but nearly full, so I got a new one. After just a couple months, the new SD card just doesn’t register anymore – neither my camera nor my computer recognize that there is a card there. The rep at Best Buy speculated that because it is “only” 128 gig, it might have been wiped out by the computer attempting to read it – something about the computer sending it 128 gig worth of data as the first step of reading it. Does that sound plausible?
if both your computer and camera can no longer see the card at all – even as a corrupted drive – but they can see other cards just fine, it sounds like a problem with the card. best case, maybe the contacts just need to be cleaned. worst case, the card is just dead.
Sorry to hear that. I’ve used 128 gig SD cards for years, in multiple cameras and camera brands, as well as computers, shooting video and hig res photos and haven’t had a problem, so I doubt it’s the card size.
for SD card corruption, i’m not sure PhotoRec is always the best tool. because PhotoRec is a file carver, you lose all the original filenames, etc., without jumping through a lot of hoops, i think.
if the corruption is minor, i’ve been able to fix the problem with a simple chkdsk (drive) /f command in Windows.