How to recover a SD card?

Question

I accidentally deleted my SD card photos.

I purchased a software call wondershare photo recovery and card recovery. I am able to recover back 50% of my photos.

But I got some strange issues here.

Actually I am able to recovered all photos. But only old photo (mean 1 or 2 years back) are recovered in full size (3-5MB), the latest photos (all 2013) were recovered in 30-100KB only. From thumbnail and the mega tag, I am able to see the image and information. But when I open the image file. Its look like fragments.

Since the day I accidentally deleted the photos, I had never use this SD card anymore to avoid data overlap. But I really dont understand why I can recovered those old photos, the latest photos all is fragments?

What did you actually do so far? More detail would be very useful. — l0b0, Jun 25 '13 at 12:55
Have you deleted some of the old pictures before and then added new ones? So some of the new pictures could become fragmented. — ott--, Jun 25 '13 at 13:07
Please search the site before asking these types of basic questions. They've been covered extensively already! — slm, Jun 25 '13 at 14:29

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 25 '13 at 14:13

1

You can try photorec from the testdisk package, but all recovery attempts are just last ditch desperation measures that fail more often than not. This is why you need to have backups of data you don't want to lose.

answered Jun 25 '13 at 14:13

psusi

17,303

I did purchased the software call cardrescue and wondershare, but non of the works. My file is just .jpeg file only. I had tried to recover the SD card, then in my recovery files. Only old photos (those 1-2 years ago photo able to recover), but recent photos like few months ago. I unable to recover it, as the file size only 35kb-100kb only. I think its just a thumbnails. – user1343112 Jun 25 '13 at 14:40
@user1343112, there's no need to repeat yourself. – psusi Jun 25 '13 at 15:54

peterph · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-26T07:31:02.293

If by fragmented you mean that the JPEG images (as that is the most commonly encoutered image format) are "pixelated" or have strange artefacts like stripes it means that the files haven't been recovered fully.

Now if the card itself is working, try cloning it with dd into a file:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p1 of=/path/to/image bs=1M

and work on the resulting image - it will be faster and you won't have to worry about accidentally damaging the only copy of your data. When one is trying to rescue the data from a media damaged in any way (e.g. a dying HDD), ddrescue is the right choice.

The file system usually used on SD cards is FAT (which has actually a rather simple structure), so you probably want to look around for utilities that would try to reconstruct that (these utilities have been around since DOS times, one example can be the Norton Utilities).

I suggest you use http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue instead of dd — Frederik Deweerdt, Jun 25 '13 at 14:16
If the card is working, there really is no need for this. In the case of a damaged media, ddrescue is the right choice of course. — peterph, Jun 26 '13 at 07:27

How to recover a SD card?

2 Answers2