Recovering Lost Photos from an SD Card: A Personal Account

Losing valuable files can be a daunting experience, especially when they hold cherished memories such as graduation photos. Recently, I encountered this very nightmare with an SD card that I believed was safely backed up—only to discover it wasn’t.

Originally, the card was used in a Canon DSLR camera, formatted in ExFAT. Just yesterday, I made the mistake of inserting it into my Garmin Dashcam, which reformatted the card to FAT32 without any warning. After recording about 5GB of Dashcam footage, I realized my grave mistake: my precious photos, comprising at least 20GB of data, were now at risk.

In desperation, I turned to data recovery software hoping to salvage my lost memories. I initially used DiskDrill, a program that has always served me well in the past, but it only detected the Dashcam videos and nothing else. I then tried PhotoRec, but my efforts were similarly fruitless.

With time slipping away and my anxiety rising, I decided to give SanDisk’s RescuePRO a shot, convinced that it might possess the capabilities I needed to recover my lost files. Unfortunately, like the others, it failed to provide any miraculous results.

As I sit here, grappling with the thought of what could be lost forever, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve overlooked something crucial in the recovery process. Should I consider giving up, or is there a trick I haven’t tried yet?

Have you ever faced a similar situation? If so, what methods did you find effective in recovering lost data? Your insights could be the key to helping me—and others—navigate this frustrating ordeal.