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Hello I try to recover deleted files from a SDXC card which was formatted and partially overwritten. The card has a size of 64GB and about 10% is overwritten. Deleting, formatting and overwriting was done by a Sony a7S camera which seems to use Sony's custom filesystem. Unfortunately the latest version of PhotoRec doesn't find any lost files on the card at all. Is there a way to recover the files?

Did you ever find a solution to this? I am having the same problem. I accidentally formatted my sd card inside the a7s and now I can't recover any of the footage no matter what software i use. A reply would be greatly appreciated.

A quick check: run TestDisk, Advanced, Image Creation. It will create an image.dd file. Zip this file, if the resulting size is very small, all data have been overwritten/zeroed.

Thanks for the reply. I will try what you suggested. Now out of curiosity, isn't it a somewhat lengthy process to zero out a card completely? Wouldn't it at least take a few minutes to zero out a card?

cgrenier wrote:A quick check: run TestDisk, Advanced, Image Creation. It will create an image.dd file. Zip this file, if the resulting size is very small, all data have been overwritten/zeroed.

So I did this and sadly, it resulted in a pretty small file. About 2.6 MB from a 64GB card. Do I have hope by sending it in to a data recovery center? I just can't believe the a7s completely overwrote/zeroed out a card in a matter of seconds?!?!

It takes almost no time to zeroed a memory card...

I ran into the same problem too. I took all my photos as .ARW, formatted using the camera a7S, and got no ARW files recovered. However, I immediately turned my camera off when it just started formatting so I am pretty sure not all data are zeroed. And my image.dd looks pretty big too. Any chance that I can get something from it?

What are the results when using PhotoRec 7.1-WIP ?

cgrenier wrote:What are the results when using PhotoRec 7.1-WIP ?

I've only managed to get a 29.6GB .gz archive with my 32GB SD card, using PhotoRec 7.1-WIP
Testdisk shows only one partition (the current one) after deep search, using intel parititon type
Another FAT32 partition shows up when I use the Raw partition type, but can't see the files inside as it says "file system might be damaged"

KlausMa wrote:Hello I try to recover deleted files from a SDXC card which was formatted and partially overwritten. The card has a size of 64GB and about 10% is overwritten. Deleting, formatting and overwriting was done by a Sony a7S camera which seems to use Sony's custom filesystem. Unfortunately the latest version of PhotoRec doesn't find any lost files on the card at all. Is there a way to recover the files?

I am in the same situation. I believe it has to do with the file format definition but I am not a coder and cannot figure it out. I hope that this thread is looked at again soon...

Also, I am currently creating an image and so far, it is looking like it will not be small, and hopefully that confirms that it has not been zeroed out. I will follow up once it is done.