How to recover

Testdisk and Photorec are usually good options for recovering files after deleting or formatting.

• Testdisk is good for accidental deletion. Use the undelete functionality in it to see if the file is still there and can be undeleted. It reads the file tables to see recently deleted files but does not attempt to search for them brute-force.

• Photorec is good for accidental formatting or when there is filesystem corruption. It ignores file tables and uses a brute-force search over the drive to identify clusters that look like they belong to valid files. This may recover images that Testdisk couldn't, but it may also corrupt some images that Testdisk may have successfully recovered.

  When using Photorec, set it to recognise ONLY the desired file types, eg JPEG. This will do a better recovery job because it'll avoid accidentally identifying random fragments of data as other files instead of as part of an image.

Follow the guides or instructions at the Testdisk/Photorec website for more information.

Why you may not be able to recover some files

Recovering after deleting or formatting is never 100% reliable. Some files will never be able to be recovered.

• If you have taken more photos or videos since, these may have overwritten the part of the drive that the deleted image was stored in.

  Even if you haven't taken more photos, the camera may have written certain files or directories to the disk for various reasons. If you have inserted the card into a computer (without sliding on the write-protect tab) the computer may have written small files such as thumbnail files to it.

• If you're using brute-force searching eg with Photorec (because you formatted, or you didn't find what you want with an undelete), it may not be able to recover files that were fragmented on the drive when they were written.