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I, accidentally, formatted my phone's SD card

I tried testdisk and photorec, but, unfortunately, I was unable to recover my files. My SD Card is 128 GB, it was formatted by the phone (Android), and I am using the data recovery solutions (testdisk and photorec) on windows 10.

I appreciate your hints towards recovering my data as I had tons personal files on that SD!!!

Run PhotoRec. In Options, enable the Expert mode. Start the recovery, choose a blocksize of 512 bytes, use the default options otherwise.
Does it work better ?

I would like to thank your efforts in availing such amazing utilities and dedicate time to respond to our inquiries.

I did the following steps (in red):

1)
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
PhotoRec is free software, and
comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
Select a media (use Arrow keys, then press Enter):
Disk /dev/sda - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/sdb - 128 GB / 119 GiB (RO)
Drive C: - 272 GB / 253 GiB (RO)
Drive D: - 2147 MB / 2048 MiB (RO)
>Drive E: - 128 GB / 119 GiB (RO)
Drive F: - 225 GB / 209 GiB (RO)
>[Proceed ] [ Quit ]

2)
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Drive E: - 128 GB / 119 GiB (RO)
Partition Start End Size in sectors
> Unknown 0 0 1 15632 28 12 251129856 [Whole disk]
P exFAT 0 0 1 15632 28 12 251129856
>[ Search ] [Options ] [File Opt] [ Quit ]
Start file recovery

3)
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
P exFAT 0 0 1 15632 28 12 251129856
To recover lost files, PhotoRec need to know the filesystem type where the
file were stored:
[ ext2/ext3 ] ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem
>[ Other ] FAT/NTFS/HFS+/ReiserFS/...

4)
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
P exFAT 0 0 1 15632 28 12 251129856

Please choose if all space need to be analysed:
[ Free ] Scan for files from exFAT unallocated space only
>[ Whole ] Extract files from whole partition

5)
I chose the destination

6)
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Try to unformat a FAT filesystem (Y/N)

Are these steps correct?

After a long process, it gave me:

7)
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Please select the block size, press Enter when done.
[ 512 ]
[ 1024 ]
[ 2048 ]
[ 4096 ]
[ 8192 ]
[ 16384 ]
[ 32768 ]
>[ 65536 ]

After about 2:20 hours of processing, it displays the following:


7)
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Create an image_remaining.dd (128571 MB) file with the unknown data (Answer N
if not sure) (Y/N)


It did not recover any of the formatted files! What did I do wrong?

it showed the following where the two recovered files are already added to the SD Card after the format.

PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Drive E: - 128 GB / 119 GiB (RO)
Partition Start End Size in sectors
P exFAT 0 0 1 15632 28 12 251129856
2 files saved in /testdisk-7.0/SGS7SD/recup_dir directory.
Recovery completed.
You are welcome to donate to support further development and encouragement
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Donation
[ Quit ]

Looks like nothing can be recovered.
Run TestDisk, Advanced, Image Creation. Compress (ie .zip) the image.dd file. What is the size of the compressed file ?
If it's less than 20MB, the content of the SD card has probably been zeroed while formated.
If it's 1 GB or more, the content of the SD card was probably encrypted or there is physical defect altering the reading of data.

Thanks, cgrenier!

The file image.dd was 119 GB and the image.rar yielded 121 MB (cannot compress with zip because of the file size)

What does that mean? What can I do further?

It is maybe useful to add, whenever I work on this SD card, testdisk recognizes the filetype as [None]

It means that unfortunately the data can not be recovered. The memory card are been wiped.

Are you serious?

I also have the same problem. How the heck did Android format it into a state where it's not recoverable( from accident)? That is just a little scary that it does that. I am sad!

When the formating occurs a TRIM operation has been used to discard the old content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(computing)#SD.2FMMC
It helps to improve the wear leveling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling
Unfortunately it means no data can be recovered.