How to Recover Deleted Files from a FAT32 SD Card: A Personal Experience

Accidentally losing important files can be a frustrating experience, especially when dealing with precious memories captured on camera. Recently, I faced a situation where I mistakenly cut all the files from a folder on my camera’s SD card while attempting to transfer them to my laptop for editing. Unfortunately, my file manager displayed incorrect filenames, leading to the deletion of my entire Pictures folder on a Linux system with an ext4 filesystem that lacks journaling.

With all my hopes resting on recovering the lost files from the SD card, I learned some valuable lessons about Data Recovery. My files were all located in a single folder, and although I used a recovery tool called testdisk, which identified the old folder structure and found several filenames, the results were far from perfect. Upon attempting to restore the files, I discovered that most of them couldn’t be opened due to potential data corruption – a very disheartening realization.

To illustrate the issue, I found a few examples:

• A broken JPG file
• A recovered RAW Fuji file that has a working preview
• A RAW file with no preview available

This experience raises the question: Is there a way to salvage these files and restore them to a usable state? If you have encountered a similar situation or have any insights on file recovery techniques that might help, I would greatly appreciate your guidance. Your expertise could make a significant difference in recovering these valuable memories. Thank you for your help!