cgsecurity.org

Hello,
I'm currently on travel abroad and I was trying to make a backup copy of a microSD card containing videos, using my Android phone to transfer data to a portable SSD (I don't have a computer with me, and I have used this procedure many times without problems before now).

When the card reader was inserted in the phone, everything was fine: the video files on the card were present and readable. Then, all of a sudden, the phone said the card was corrupt and it kind of "unmounted" it. Immediately after that, the card was mounted automatically again and all the files were missing, and free space was 32 Gb out of 32.
I didn't do anything, everything happened on its own.

I have now placed the card in a secure place but since I have no idea about what happened, I am not sure about how to proceed to recover the important video files that kind of ironically I was trying to backup for safety when this happened.

Any help would be very much appreciated.
Thank you very much.

When having access to a notebook or desktop computer use ddrescue to duplicate the SD card.
If that fails contact a professional recovery lab.

Ok, so I make images of the corrupted card and work on the copies, if I understand correctly.
Next step would be to try with TestDisk, correct?
Thank you very much

Yes.

I finally managed to work on the corrupted card.
Since the card was probably reformatted by Android, with the same partition type (FAT32) TestDisk didn't work but PhotoRec did!!
I managed to recover most of the lost videos and I really can't thank you enough for this great piece of software.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!