Data recovery software advice

[Octane]

I made a monumental blunder. I removed a 32GB micro SD card from my go-pro camera to backup the 20 odd GB of footage. I mixed up SD cards and by mistake put the card in my Android phone instead. I spent days looking for the card and of course later found it in the phone minus the film footage. The phone apparently formated the card. R-Studio recovery software did not not do the job.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

PS I realize Mixture is going to be hard on me for this, so I'm ducking but well aware I screwed up and deserve the incoming... :-(

Thanks

Octane

[Avtrician]

Pandora Recovery is free and very powerful, it takes a little getting used to but does an excellent job.

[mixture]

PS I realize Mixture is going to be hard on me for this, so I'm ducking but well aware I screwed up and deserve the incoming... :-(

Well....

Given that you've recognised your sins and visited the confession box with an honest statement, just this time I'll let you get away with three hail-marys and allow you to get on with your self-imposed salvage work.

But next time, you'll be waterboarded with the holy water.

Good luck, you'll need it.

[Octane]

Can you offer any suggestions?

Thanks

[mixture]

Can you offer any suggestions?

The honest and serious answer is that given your original description, there's a 99% chance you're between a rock and a hard place.

However, I'll take a look through my bookmarks and stuff a bit later today and see if I can find anything that may be worth trying as a last resort.

[Alice_Phoebe]

try easeus data recovery, EaseUS' product also includes support for data corruption brought about by unexpected crashes, loss of power, or removing a device without first unmounting it. File support includes most of the commonly used image, music, video, and document file types for a variety of applications.

Windows-compatible FAT/FAT32, and exFAT file systems are supported for use with USB flash drive and external hard drives

[mixture]

Octane,

Your only real hope is file carving software, a specialist forensics tool.

Can't really recommend any, and the best stuff is of course commercial and costs $$$, but a few free/cheap names you might want to peruse :

CnW Recovery Software
Simple Carver Suite
Foremost
ReviveIT (RevIT)
PhotoRec

Feel free to Googoo "file carving" for more options.

Good luck, and if you can, I'd strongly suggest running tools off an image rather than directly on the media.

[belfrybat]

The phone apparently formated the card.

If it does that automatically on insertion, get rid of it. Not just throw it away, get an anvil and sledgehammer. Spend a good 15 minutes pulverising it. Then throw the dust on a really hot fire.

[Mac the Knife]

"I'd strongly suggest running tools off an image rather than directly on the media."

Very important point from mix. Actually this is pretty much mandatory. If you fkuk up recovery on the original then you're SOL. Fkup up recovery off an image and you can always try again.

You might be lucky.

Mac

:ouch:

[jimjim1]

I have used CnW recovery to recover from a corrupt root directory caused by moving an active disk drive. The only option Windows offered was to re-format. I bought a 30 day license for $20US. As "luck" would have it all files were in sub-directories and I recovered everything using the automatic procedure. The software finds directories on the disk.

Make very sure that you are not writing to the damaged media. The ideal is that you image the corrupt disk and work with the image. As I recall the $20 version of the CnW software does not allow this. It creates images but does allow them to be read. That costs more.

You can try out the software for free, it lists the files it has found but will not actually recover them. You cannot of course be sure that the "recovered" files are good until you try to use them. At least if it can't find anything you don't have to pay.

[Octane]

Thank you everyone for your input, I'll report back when I'm back from holidays

Cheers

Octane