A coworker approached us today with a corrupted SD card. It was out of her digital camera, as well as when plugged in, it wasn’t recognized. This appeared like the best chance to try out [Christophe Grenier]’s PhotoRec. PhotoRec is created to recuperate lost files from lots of different types of storage media. We utilized it from the command line on OSX, however it works on lots of different platforms.
It’s a relatively basic program to use. We plugged in the card as well as introduced PhotoRec. We were prompted to choose which volume we wished to recover. We chosen “Intel” as the partition table. PhotoRec didn’t discover any type of partitions, so we opted to browse the “Whole disk”. We kept the default filetypes. It then asked for filesystem type where we selected “Other” since flash is formatted FAT by default. We then selected a directory for the recovered files as well as started the process. PhotoRec scans the entire disk trying to find understood data headers. It uses these to discover the lost picture data. The 1GB card took around 15 minutes to scan as well as recovered all photos. This is truly a fantastic piece of complimentary software, however ideally you’ll never have to utilize it.