help recovering photos from an SD card

TC77

Hi, I had some photos on a memory card for my Sony Cyber shot HX400v and they've disappeared. I assume I pressed something which deleted all of them a few days ago. I've read that you can use some software to recover but don't know what is reliable. Any suggestions and if free software all the better. Many thanks for any advice

vacheron

I've used the free version of Recuva  (CCcleaner.com) on a number of occasions to restore quick formatted and deleted data with good success, haven't used it in a few years now though.

First thing to do is take the card and see if it has a physical write lock switch and side it to the "Lock" position so that nothing can write any further data to the card.

Eyeful

1. Immediate Action:  Stop using the SD card immediately to prevent overwriting data. Remove it from your device.

2. Free Recovery Software:  https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893

3. How to recover your photos can be found on YouTube type in: "Recovering photos from SD card"

Newcad

As said above, Recuva can get photos back from an SD card and even from a reformatted drive/card (assuming that the SD card was reformatted).

The method that you would use is different depending on if the files were deleted or if the drive/card has been reformatted.
So the starting point is knowing what happened, but If you don't know that then I would try the method for a reformatted drive/card first.
That looks for 'non-deleted' files so can be quicker that searching the whole drive/card for deleted files.
If that doesn't recover what you want then gi for the standard deleted files recovery method.

Here is a link giving instructions on how to use Recuva to get the non-deleted files back from a reformatted drive:
https://community.ccleaner.com/t/recover-non-deleted-files-from-crashed-reformatted-drive/79290/2

There is a link at the bottom to a video showing the method being used on a reformatted SD card. The video is a good one on using Recuva generally.

Of course other recovery tools are available, personally I've had the most sucess in various situations when using Recuva.

TC77

Thank you so much. I have taken it out and put on one side.. I took a couple of photos before realising but hope that otherwise can be recovered as can't have written  over all.  Appreciate all the  advice and I'll try prob at the weekend now.

spud17

Depends how techy you are. 
I've had excellent results recovering all types of files by using TestDisk, added bonus is that it's free.
Download: https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
How to: https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step
Despite it's name PhotoRec finds all file types.