Page 1 of 1

Searching for files after reformatting SD card in-camera and shooting to it.

Posted: 06 Aug 2016, 20:36
by schwickity
Hello! I tried finding this info by searching the forum, and wasn't able to find an answer easily. I'm hoping someone here can help me out.

Equipment:
Lexar 128gb SDXC
Sony A7R II Camera
Lexar Professional Workflow SR2 SD UHS-II USB 3.0 Card Reader
Mac OS X 10.10.5 on iMac

Using Photorec to try to recover old images to a recently reformatted card that I have shot some photos on since.

The Story:

Photographed an event, thought I imported all of the memory cards, but I might have skipped a card.

Next week I format the card I probably skipped importing inside my Sony A7R II and shoot another event, but use less than half of the card.

Using Photorec, I'm trying to see images on the card since before the formatting. When I run photorec, it makes two folders with the raw files from the camera with a different extension (.sr2), as well as a huge .GZ file (92 gb) which it says should be opened with an unzipping program, but when I try, I get the error "Unable to expand "f693498888.gz" into "recup_dir.2" (Error 32 - Broken pipe.)

There is a possibility it's on another memory card, but I'm trying it on all 3 it could possibly be, and it doesn't seem to be showing me any files beyond what I can normally get off of the memory cards. I need it to dig deeper.

Inside Photorec, I've chosen Whole Disk to search, and I've run it twice on the different choices of filesystems as I'm not sure what Sony uses, and I wasn't able to find that info readily. Both methods [ext2/ext3] and [other] yielded the same exact results.

Please help! I'd love to be able to get some of the images if I can.

Re: Searching for files after reformatting SD card in-camera and shooting to it.

Posted: 07 Aug 2016, 10:03
by cgrenier
It's not possible to recover files that have been overwritten by new data.
You can rename all .sr2 files to the usual extension if necessary to process them in your usual Darktable / Lightroom like software.

Re: Searching for files after reformatting SD card in-camera and shooting to it.

Posted: 07 Aug 2016, 16:41
by schwickity
Thank you so much for your reply!

I understand that if a file has been written over, it will be gone, but wouldn't I be able to see at least a couple images since before the reformatting, even if I've shot to the card? Let's say I fill up an entire card (2,500 images for arguments sake), format in camera, then take 300 pictures. With recovery software, wouldn't it be possible to see at least some of the 2,500 images that were taken before the format?