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Recover data from SD card

I usually format my SD card after I save photos to my laptop. Now I want to recover photos those are before I format SD card three times.

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Is it possible? then how?

thanx..

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Why do you format? If you move the files, then the space is freed up. On an NTFS drive, the MFT can be shrunk by formatting, thus freeing up a little bit of space, but memory cards usually use FAT32 which has a predefined and constant file-system overhead, so there is nothing to be gained from formatting. The only practical reason to format the card is to wipe out private stuff (like photos) in case the card is lost/sold/etc., but that only works if you do a full format (which adds extra wear to memory cards), but then, obviously you cannot recover anything. – Synetech Nov 10 '12 at 15:06

marked as duplicate by Oliver Salzburg♦ Nov 10 '12 at 15:07

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Depends...

Let's assume for the moment, that the SD-Card doesn't use any Wear Leveling at all.

Let's assume, you'd only taken one picture between formats.

Then nope, you can't. Even if you only use quickformat, the image would be stored on the same location again, so the data would have been overwritten.

Since it is most likely that your SD-Card uses Wear Leveling, the second image would not have been stored to the same location as the first picture taken. You can try your luck with PhotoRec, bu there are no guarantees.

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> the image would be stored on the same location again, so the data would have been overwritten.   Not necessarily. It should store files sequentially, but often files end up getting stored at different (seemingly random) locations due to the next-free-cluster pointer, depending on various factors. The question does not give details, but it fairly safe to assume that there are more than one image at any given time, so some of them may be stored later in the card. That said, Bonsi is correct that anything that has been overwritten is gone forever. :-( – Synetech Nov 10 '12 at 15:02

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