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After you have recovered as many files as possible, how can anyone be sure there are none left on the SD? Files that cant be recovered without sending the card to India and physically pulling it apart and reading the constituent parts?

Or is this NEVER necessary after PhotoRec has done its job?

I gave my wife a couple of 32 GB SD cards to put in her phone(s) to store jpg files. They both died. One was an el-cheapo card, the other a Sandisk. I did manage to recover about 600 MB of files from each, - quite easily. PhotoRec worked great!

i would imagine there are lots more files on the cards but I dont really know!

Has anyone ever done any tests on dead SD cards by pulling them apart and reading the memory blocks that way? To find, (not a few individual photos here and there) but gigabytes worth of .jpgs?

If in doubt, please consult with a professional recovery lab - do simply not use Photorec.
Buy a commercial product and ask the manufacturer the same questions.

Use SD cards, never use backups and send your broken devices to India and they will send you 110% of content back -guaranteed!

Has anyone ever done any tests on dead SD cards by pulling them apart and reading the memory blocks that way?

I do this in five minutes before breakfast each day. It's so simple.

"I do this in five minutes before breakfast each day. It's so simple."

Thank you for that helpful comment, - do these inspections ever reveal any files on the 'hard' memory of the dissembled card which weren't recovered by any software method?

recuperation wrote: 30 Nov 2020, 18:08 Use SD cards, never use backups and send your broken devices to India and they will send you 110% of content back -guaranteed!

Obviously you missed my irony.

1. Do not use SD card as storage. Consider SD cards as unreliable transport media.
2. Use backups! It should have been obvious to you that advising not to use backups is a bad advice.
3. My words "guaranteed 110% of content" should have made you suspicious. Unfortunately you missed that, too.
4. Flash storage seems to be difficult. This is nothing you do before breakfast.

Do me a favour:

Do not hide your personal deception of Photorec not meeting your recovery expectations behind a bullshit phrase like:

Re: Is there a fundamental flaw in talk of file recovery?

If you read the postings in this forum you will notice that people are quite regularly told to contact a recovery lab.
Everything here is about logical recovery. Software can't help you with broken hardware. Sectors that are broken or not accessible won't be become readible by means of any commercial recovery software.

You now learnt that we are only dealing with logical recovery. Testdisk is limited to repair only a few well-defined logical errors with partitions and Photorec is the fingerprinting king. Being aware of that limitation, I always advise to try out any commercial software because there is an area of possible success by taken into account what seem to be the remains of metadata.
An example for that are sectors that look like FAT directories for instance.

The certainty you obviously care about, information about possible remains of information can be easily be provided by investing lots of money in recovery software (other recovery strategies than Photorec fingerprinting) and recovery labs (overcoming hardware failures).
I'll be eager to learn from your experience.

But please do not talk again about "fundamental flaws" again. Your "fundamental flaws" depict a fundamental lack of knowledge - unfortunately.