Recently, one of my SD cards failed on me when I trying to access it. After I inserted it into my Transcend card reader, I was able to access the card momentarily until the folders abruptly closed down, preventing any further access to the data. As you can imagine, this was quite concerning to me.
Fortunately, a company called Stellar Recovery reached out to me asking if I wanted to review their software. This was quite a strange yet very welcome coincidence, and in my latest video, I test the software on an actual failed SD card. In my career as a photographer, I've had approximately four storage devices fail on me. It's unfortunate, but it does happen, and the most recent failure was much harder for me to swallow. The images on the card were ones that I needed, and I was a little careless, as I had not previously backed up all of the files. In any case, I have now managed to recover all of the required files due to Stellar, and I'm very pleased to have those images back.
Since uploading the video, I have received some really helpful suggestions on how to ensure I can recover data more effectively in the future. For the most part, I've been told not to format the card before I perform any recoveries. This is because performing a quick format as I do in the video creates new directories on the storage device, and this could inadvertently overwrite existing data that you may want to recover.
I am by no means an expert when it comes to recovering data, so please check out the video and let me know if you have any of your own suggestions on how to recover data more effectively. Ultimately, I'm very pleased that I have been able to recover the images and files I needed, and I highly recommend Stella Recovery.
NEVER EVER format any card in a computer. After you have downloaded a card, insert it back in the camera and format it in the camera. Same goes for deleting image files in-camera. It can corrupt the card. Just keep shooting and delete it after DL'ing the entire card.
I've been told it does. I probably did the wrong thing by formatting it on my computer and maybe should have formatted in camera instead.
Who knows...you probably did it right by doing a quick format on your computer for recovery purposes. Reason I say this is, once I inadvertently started to format a card (I meant to clean the sensor but muscle memory got the better of me). It got almost half way on the progress bar before I shut the camera down. We were on vacation so kept the card unused until we got home. I must have tried about 3 different recovery software, no luck. There was literally nothing recoverable. There goes my Venice, Italy memory. Sniff sniff.
Again, who knows, maybe by me shutting down the camera caused everything to be lost. Or, the in-camera formatting is much more aggressive in deleting stuff. Notice how it takes longer to format in-camera vs on a computer.
Why not just go to your other card from your second slot?
Try Disk Digger, it's free
If you google PC Smart Recovery you will find a German software company that has outstanding freeware for this. I have used it for many years -- even forensically -- to recover images. There are two versions: one for image recovery and one for PC hard drive issues. I have seen cards of all types fail with the exception of XQD.