Tips to recover data from Secure Digital cards
Posted by admin on April 27th, 2010Data loss from an SD (Secure Digital) card is a very common phenomenon. The loss could be a nightmare for a photographer who invested a good deal of time and efforts to create a bank of valuable pictures. Data loss from an SD card can occur owing to various reasons like interruption in read/write process, file system corruption and virus attacks. ‘Delete all’ button in digital cameras could land a photographer in trouble if it gets pressed accidentally. Fortunately, there are ways to perform SD card recovery. Here’s what you can do in a data loss situation:
Don’t use the SD card
It is suggested not to take more pictures or transfer any more files on to the card. If you don’t use the SD card after an event of data loss, you increase the probability of SD card recovery. When files are deleted, their data remains 100 per cent intact on an SD card. The SD card, however, marks the space free to be overwritten by another file. If you don’t use the card, no data can be written onto it, thus keeping the chances of successful recovery bright.
In order to be extra sure of things, you can push down the little switch on the left side of an SD card to ‘write-protect’ the disk. As long as it is locked, nothing can be written on the card.
Take it out and re-insert it
On a few events, a computer cannot recognize the data stored on an SD card. Remove the card, reinsert it and ‘refresh’ the windows.
Check your camera, you can find data there
On rare occasions, when you don’t insert an SD card properly, or the camera setting may have been changed, the data gets stored in the internal memory. If this is the situation, use an SD card and copy all pictures from the internal memory to the card. Make sure that the SD card is not locked before you undertake any writing operation
Recovering data
You have to use an SD card recovery software to retrieve data after observing the above discussed strategies. There are plenty of SD card recovery utilities available on the Internet. These third-party tools scan the storage media and extract data in the original form.
Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is an efficient tool which recovers lost/deleted/formatted pictures and other multimedia files from a range of memory cards including SD, SDHC, MMC, MMC plus etc. The SD card recovery software is available in two separate versions, one each for both Windows and Mac users.