How to rescue photos from a formatted or damaged memory card.

It's happened to most of us; accidentally formatted a memory card, inexplicably corrupted - either way - this is what to do and what you need, to recover your photos for free.

Ali

Ali Watters
Post Count: 3878

Msg: #1 541 days ago, June 12th 2008

Firstly - don't panic.

If you accidentally format a memory card there is hope - in fact you should be able to recover all the photos on the card. If the card becomes corrupted - there is also a strong probability that most of of the photos will be intact and recoverable - here is a step by step list of things to do, and the equipment and software you need.

1 - stop taking photos - take the memory card out of the camera and put it in a safe place.

2 - equipment you need - you need a card reader, a computer (faster the better), about the same amount of space as the card (eg. 4gb for a 4gb card)

3 - software you need - for a simple format or delete from the card - the fastest repair will be with Free Undelete - for a corrupted or complex format (where you perhaps continue taking photos! - arghh done that!) - try Art Plus - Digital Photo Recovery or Recuva

Free Undelete - will go through the file allocation table - and mark deleted files as recovered - quick and simple - if it gets your files back great - that's it.

Art Plus - Digital Photo Recovery - it takes several hours to scan the contents of a large card - depending on the speed etc - it analyzes the disk looking for header information that matches image formats - and reconstructs the images from this.

4 - that's it - store your photos carefully

I hope that helps someone sometime...

My story is - I went to Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia - got up for sunrise, took lots of photos, later in the day - at the Train Graveyard running out time for sunset - I absent-mindedly formatted the card with the photos from the early part of the day - instead of the final backup card - I didn't realise until I got back to the hostel and found the wrong card in the camera. I'd continued taking 100 or so photos.

I managed to recover about 50% of the days photos - but sadly my blog will be missing some of the best shots taken with the best early light.

[Edited: 13:07 - Ali - added extra software]

armadillo1

leoseo
Post Count: 1

Msg: #2 148 days ago, July 10th 2009

If you have problems with your memory card in 80% of all cases the controller of your card is damaged and no software or card reader can help. You must separate the memory chip and dump the raw data to recover your data, look here: CF xD SD memory card/stick photo recovery

DanP

Dan P
Post Count: 4

Msg: #3 134 days ago, July 25th 2009

I can second Ali's advice, I lost about 300 pictures recently thru card corruption, so it can happen!!

anonymous

Post Count: 4

Msg: #4 96 days ago, September 1st 2009

Ali, thankyou so much for those tips, i was able to use recuva to recover lost files from 2 different memory cards which had been corrupted.

and then inspired to do some surgery on a 3rd memory card whos case had been broken. which was succesful!
(by way of cracking open one of the other cards and transferring the case over)

windows wouldnt open it but good old recuva came to the rescue again and got me back 700 fotos and around 20 videos from my first month of travel in south america 2008.

and to add to the bonus, of course it was able to bring up some old fotos i had manually deleted too.

ahh... somtimes things just work out!

:-)

matty1

matt
Post Count: 124

Msg: #5 96 days ago, September 1st 2009

huh .. that was me but the website says it was "anonymous"..

anyway thanks again ali!

NickTheTrick

Nick Thomas
Post Count: 19

Msg: #6 95 days ago, September 1st 2009

I'm pleased to hear you've had success getting back your photos.

Generally speaking corruption in a memory card (or accidental formatting) will destroy only the mapping tables which map host addresses to physical positions within the NAND memory.

In an SD card the mapping tables are very simple: a block mapping scheme is used. Data for large files is maintained in the order its written within blocks. Faster cards will employ a binary layer which allows much faster writing, but necessarily more complex mapping. In other words there's more chance for things to go wrong.

At all times the most up-to-date mappings must be stored in NAND memory (non-volatile) except the last few writes which can be reconstructed by looking at header data within the data if required. This is because when the power goes off the volatile 'working' memory is lost.

So basically problems can occur when you get an uncontrolled shutdown in the card. In controlled shutdown the card has plenty of time to store its state within non-volatile memory. But if the power is lost suddenly then if you just happened to be writing something to NAND at that time then potentially you've lost that data. If that's a photo then it's probably not a big deal, but if it just happened to have been writing an address table, or worse still a master index of the address table then you will 'lose' some or all the data in the card. As Ali said, the data is still there, but the address table to find is unreadable. Fortunately most cards will embed header data within the actual data and it should be reconstructable (just don't try to use the card normally though as you may end up overwriting something).

So prevention: don't try to eek the last bit out of your camera batteries, don't pull the card out of the camera or a computer without 'ejecting' it first.

Also it's probably worth replacing your cards every few years. As they fill up they perform slower (there's no way to actually remove old data from them currently, though this will change with new cards for Windows 7) and wear out faster (more write amplification). As blocks wear out the card will perform even slower and wear out even faster! If it wears out completely, in the best case you'll be left with a read only card. In the worst you'll have lost everything.

Hope that adds some reason to the above posts.
Nick

Number of Users: 6
Number of Posts: 6

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