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Accidentally formatted SD-Card of a7RII

SilvanM
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SilvanM Newbie

SilvanM

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Hi! Made a huge mistake just now. Came back from wonderful holidays in Spain including a beautiful trip to Alhambra a nice palace in Granada. Now when going back I was playing around with the NTSC/PAL settings because the lights were flickering so I changed the format and the camera prompted me to format the SD-Card. As lazy as I was (sadly) I just clicked through the menu and it started showing the format screen. I instantly new my fate and ripped out the SD-Card during the process, which might have been a mistake in hindsight. 
Now luckily I was able to recover most of my files using Disk Drill on macOS, but the first day (which sadly is Alhambra, so the most interesting) does not show up in any of the disk recovery tools (maybe because I ripped out the SD-Card). Does anyone have an idea how I could recover these files (no additional photos were taken after format)?

Thank you very much, I'll include some details down below:

  • SD-Card: Kingston SDG3/64GB CANVAS Go! Plus
  • Tried to recover using Disk Drill and EaseUS
  • Camera: Sony a7RII (ILCE7RM2)
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XKAES Proficient

XKAES

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File recovery software is the only thing I can think of.  I'm not a MAC user, but some file recovery software is "better" than others.  You could try something else, but the recovery software that you have already used might have made changes on the card that make further recovery impossible. 

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FunWithCameras Collaborator

FunWithCameras

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Sorry to hear about that. Even sorrier because I can picture myself doing something like that :( 

First question; was the reformat while you were in Alhambra? If so, and you have used the card since, then the new photographs are probably written over the old ones, and you won't be able to get anything back.

Back a long time ago it used to be fairly easy to recover images because "formatting" card simply overwrote the root directory, so the images were still on the card, but you had to "recognise" the sectors.

These days I think some cameras use the SSD "Secure Erase" hardware command which does a hardware wipe of the SSD sectors - there is no recovering data from that. Whether the A7RII uses Secure Erase is something I just don't know.

 

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SilvanM Newbie

SilvanM

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4 hours ago, FunWithCameras said:

Sorry to hear about that. Even sorrier because I can picture myself doing something like that :( 

First question; was the reformat while you were in Alhambra? If so, and you have used the card since, then the new photographs are probably written over the old ones, and you won't be able to get anything back.

Back a long time ago it used to be fairly easy to recover images because "formatting" card simply overwrote the root directory, so the images were still on the card, but you had to "recognise" the sectors.

These days I think some cameras use the SSD "Secure Erase" hardware command which does a hardware wipe of the SSD sectors - there is no recovering data from that. Whether the A7RII uses Secure Erase is something I just don't know.

 

Hi! Thank you for your condolences! 😃

It happened right after shooting all photos - so no new photos were added after the incident. Only recovery software accessed the card after that. I‘m pretty sure the data is still on there since the format took less than a couple seconds, which renders overwriting 64 GBs of data impossible. But I have some (bad) updates:

1. Tried some more recovery programs like the infamous Photorec, sadly did not help.

2. Asked a data recovery specialist, this is what he said:

Quote

Hi, Sony formats cards in a different way. Recovery of your data will depend on the type of a card you use these days. Many brands have switched to a new error correction algorithm called LDPC. This type of ECC is not supported by any of the tools, so we can't recover those. Your card is Canvas and all of the Canvas production is LDPC. Sadly, I don't think there is a way to recover your data for now


So I guess for now I‘ll just keep the SD-Card and not use it. Maybe at one point it will be possible…

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