Can I recover videos from an SD card I accidentally formatted?
Asked by
VelvetKite42
I filmed around 35–40 interview clips for work using a Nikon D7500 and a 64 GB SanDisk SD card. After importing the footage into iMovie and starting to edit, I accidentally put the card back in the camera and formatted it. I stopped using it as soon as I realized what happened. Disk Drill was able to find the files, but recovering them requires paying about $100. I tried TestDisk and a few other tools, but I'm not very experienced with data recovery. Are there reliable free options for recovering the video files?
Answers
Try PhotoRec first. It’s free and can recover files even when a drive or card won’t mount normally. Save the recovered files to a different drive, and don’t write anything else to the formatted card.
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R-Photo or similar free recovery tools may also work despite the name being photo-focused; they can often search for video formats too. Disk Drill finding the clips is a good sign, but free tools may require more manual sorting or recover files without their original names.
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Recuva is another free option worth testing. It may recover video files, although results depend on how the camera formatted the card and whether anything has overwritten the old data.
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VelvetKite42: I wasn’t sure whether Recuva handled video files, so I wanted to check before relying on it. I’ll try it carefully and avoid using the card.