Why can I only recover older photos on SD card

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Christian Thomas

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Mar 1, 2015
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I am trying to help a friend recover photos taken on a Nikon D800 from an SD card which he deleted by accident. I have tried a variety of recovery tools, Recuva, mini Tool, DMDE, Asphoto etc. but seem to only be able to recover older photos, not the ones he deleted last week. He deleted them on the camera, not on a computer, but I still can't find them at all - though there are 600 others dating back to 2012.

I suspect, but don't know, that a folder has been deleted and the photos are in there. What I think I need is something like the old Norton Utilities to rewrite the FAT rather that just recover the files to another disk. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on or what other tools I could use. Thanks.
 
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cryoburner

cryoburner

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If you only tried the default quick scan in Recuva, or possibly some of those other utilities, you might also try some of the other scan options. Recuva has some settings in its options panel for things like "deep scan" which scans through all the data looking for files, and "scan for non-deleted files", which would be what you would want if the card were quick formatted, rather than just the files being deleted.

I don't know whether this applies in your case, but if the files are fragmented when stored, it can complicate recovery. I believe Recuva doesn't even attempt to recover fragmented files, only recovering those that were written in one sequential block. Particularly if the card were nearly full when the most recent files were written, it's possible many of them were split up in two or more fragments when they were written to the card. Recuva may be able to find the location where these files start, and the size of the files, but it won't be able to find the additional fragments of the files.

Some other recovery software can attempt to piece together fragmented files for certain known filetypes by matching patterns between the fragments, but it's still not always guaranteed that it will be able to recover them. And the image format could also affect the recoverability of such fragmented files. While a particular recovery utility might be able to recognize jpeg images, for example, it might be less likely to recognize and piece together the RAW image format that was probably used on a professional-level camera like that. It might be worth finding out what format the files were stored in, if you don't already know.
 
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Christian Thomas

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Thanks for your suggestions on Recuva. I found them and have tried again but it's just not doing it. I have probably tried about 10 different bits of software now but they just refuse to find these 50 files. The format is likely to be NEF or RAW I'm told. I have picked up a few of those - though mainly jpegs - but they date from 2014 and, I believe, a previous camera. It seems to be this new camera whose files are eluding me.

I am tempted to find an old copy of Norton Utilities but the last time I used it I'm not even sure we had FAT32. LOL.

 
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Christian Thomas

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Thanks for those articles. I picked up a couple more bits of software from them - Card Recovery and ZAR, think - but I'm losing track of how many I have tried. I have had several of them running at the same time on various copies but the result doesn't get any better.
 
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Christian Thomas

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There was an answer from a lab here which was posted a few minutes ago. Where has that gone. The question I wanted to ask them is whether there is a reason the recovery software can't find DSLR files - I believe they are either RAWs or NEFs. These files were deleted in the camera and by the camera.
 
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ex_bubblehead

ex_bubblehead

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Don't bother asking them. Commercial spammer. No longer able to post here.
 
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