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I accidentally deleted a shot yesterday by mistake. I downloaded Recuva and scanned my MicroSD card.

I can see images I deleted going all the way back to the holiday season on there, but I can't find the one deleted yesterday.

Recuva also shows you which files were overwritten, but the filename of the file I'm looking for (rough estimate based on other photos I took that day) isn't even in that list.

Anyone have any suggestions? Try different software? I'm on a D60. Does it have a recycle bin feature perhaps?

MikeW
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Drowsy
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  • http://photo.stackexchange.com/q/1125/4892 - Try another option. PhotoRec for example. – dpollitt May 19 '15 at 03:32
  • What OS? As much as an OSS person that I am, I really like "zero assumption recovery" and will do jpegs for free...can't help too much about raws. – SailorCire May 20 '15 at 17:52

2 Answers2

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How to recover

Testdisk and Photorec are usually good options for recovering files after deleting or formatting.

  • Testdisk is good for accidental deletion. Use the undelete functionality in it to see if the file is still there and can be undeleted. It reads the file tables to see recently deleted files but does not attempt to search for them brute-force.

  • Photorec is good for accidental formatting or when there is filesystem corruption. It ignores file tables and uses a brute-force search over the drive to identify clusters that look like they belong to valid files. This may recover images that Testdisk couldn't, but it may also corrupt some images that Testdisk may have successfully recovered.

    When using Photorec, set it to recognise ONLY the desired file types, eg JPEG. This will do a better recovery job because it'll avoid accidentally identifying random fragments of data as other files instead of as part of an image.

Follow the guides or instructions at the Testdisk/Photorec website for more information.

Why you may not be able to recover some files

Recovering after deleting or formatting is never 100% reliable. Some files will never be able to be recovered.

  • If you have taken more photos or videos since, these may have overwritten the part of the drive that the deleted image was stored in.

    Even if you haven't taken more photos, the camera may have written certain files or directories to the disk for various reasons. If you have inserted the card into a computer (without sliding on the write-protect tab) the computer may have written small files such as thumbnail files to it.

  • If you're using brute-force searching eg with Photorec (because you formatted, or you didn't find what you want with an undelete), it may not be able to recover files that were fragmented on the drive when they were written.

Community
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thomasrutter
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  • the set of files deleted long ago is probably not 100% complete ... some were recently overwritten. – Skaperen May 20 '15 at 11:03
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From my personal experience of recovering deleted photos, I used Wondershare to do that. It brought back around 70-80 photographs I mistakenly deleted by formatting the SD card of my camera. Wondershare worked great for me, it might work for you too. Try it.

UserSum
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