Recover pictures from a formatted micro sd card HELP

liveforeva

liveforeva

liveforeva

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Hi
My girlfriends nan has recently had a new phone. Her old phone had an SD card in it with all her pictures saved on to it.

She has put the SD card into her new phone and now the SD card Is empty. I think she has formatted it unknowingly as everything is gone.

I have used a few programs now to try and recover the deleted photos the most recent program being disc drill and all have found nothing apart from the folders but nothing is in the folders.

Would the phone have done a full format or is there another reason why I can't recover anything? Is there anything else I could do or try ? before I have to give her the bad news.

Thanks
 
If Photorec and Recuva haven't found anything, I think there's nothing there to be found. A friend formatted get MicroSD when moving from a Galaxy S7 to an S9, I assumed it would do a quick format and leave the data intact, but when I viewed the memory card even in a raw hex editor, it was all zeros. Looks like newer phones at least actually do full formats, sadly.
 
Confused Stu said:
If Photorec and Recuva haven't found anything, I think there's nothing there to be found. A friend formatted get MicroSD when moving from a Galaxy S7 to an S9, I assumed it would do a quick format and leave the data intact, but when I viewed the memory card even in a raw hex editor, it was all zeros. Looks like newer phones at least actually do full formats, sadly.
Click to expand...

Just what I thought unfortunately.
Thank you for you help.
 
It would take a while to do a full format on the sort of high capacity cards you get these days. Such a long time, in fact, that I think it is more likely to actually perform a quick format by default; but also, in addition, a TRIM command, which is another swift way of ensuring data has gone kaputt.

Anyway, to avoid it happening again, use a cloud sync app.
 
Flash memory is very problematic for recovery compared to HDD.

In HDD everything is logically arranged with file system level address corresponding always to similar position physical address on actual disk.
And with easy writes over existing data meaning that actual old data doesn't have to be removed when deleting files.
Hence as rule only marking of file is removed from file allocation table instead of actual file content being deleted.
Which stays on drive until new data is written onto that address.
Hence without full physical surface format of whole drive basically all data can be recovered.

Flash memory again needs erasing/zeroing cells before new data can be written to those.
So besides simple emptying of file allocation table, drive's controller is usually told instantly that all those actual files have been erased.
That makes drive's controller start literally erasing cells occupied by those files on background.
Also not a single file system address has fixed relation to some physical address on Flash memory chips.
With controller mapping file system level address to different physical address possibly every time.

So recovering anything from Flash drive with bigger data removal done is very challenging even for professional data recovery companies.
 
liveforeva said:
Hi
My girlfriends nan has recently had a new phone. Her old phone had an SD card in it with all her pictures saved on to it.

She has put the SD card into her new phone and now the SD card Is empty. I think she has formatted it unknowingly as everything is gone.

I have used a few programs now to try and recover the deleted photos the most recent program being disc drill and all have found nothing apart from the folders but nothing is in the folders.

Would the phone have done a full format or is there another reason why I can't recover anything? Is there anything else I could do or try ? before I have to give her the bad news.

Thanks
Click to expand...


Try this :- https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk




Never used this, so not sure how well it works.
 
Testdisk can recover removed partitions (I've used it when I was setting up Windows and deleted the partition on the wrong drive before realising!). It doesn't recover individual files - that's Photorec's job, which is from the same company.
 
iv always wondered if you zeroed the data or overwritten it on a hdd how can you get the data back? if its possible then my 3tb drive can become a 6tb drive. as in store 3tb of data then overwrite it with another 3tb and then when i want the first 3tb back use restoration program. it cant be that simple. i get with just a quick format its possible but once overwritten or zeroed its a different story no?
 
For practical purposes, yes - once a 1 or 0 is overwritten on a hard drive, the data is unrecoverable. String together a few overwritten and the whole fine quickly becomes unrecoverable too.

There have been tests and studies where the scientists could tell by examining the platters and measuring the magnetic strength what that bit used to be. In simple terms that I understand, if it's a 1 now then it used to be a 1 before, but if it's a 0.98, then it likely was a 0 that got changed to a 1. There problem is you have to take the hard drive apart and do this for every individual bit. When a simple 2MB JPEG is made up of over 16 million of these bits, that gets very long, complex and fraught with risk as you're effectively taking an educated case for each bit, so eight guesses per byte.

Pretty sure it's impractical outside of a lab test, or maybe the NSA's supercomputers working on a single small HDD!
 
I had a similar situation last year. Out of inexperience, my friend formatted an SD card that contained photos, videos and other important files. We connected it to a PC and scanned it with Uneraser. This program helped to recover almost all important files.
 
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