Honestly, I had a Sony digital camera that was received as a birthday gift. It had helped me recorded many important moments of the past twp years. Moreover, to avoid data loss, I had saved them all on the inner SD card, not the camera internal memory. However, last month, this camera was formatted mistakenly and all my photos stored on this SD card were gone.

So, to get my lost cameras photos back, I had done a Google Search and found many memory card data recovery software, like:
http://www.ucfix.com/data-recovery/data-recovery-after-format-memory-card.html
http://freeware-fix.blogspot.com/2013/03/memory-card-recovery.html
http://blog4mark.blogspot.com/2013/01/memory-card-recovery.html

Fortunately, after reading many related articles and threads, I had chosen a reliable data recovery program and rescued them all back with ease and success. Am I lucky?

If you also really have no luck to recover lost data, my experiences may also give you some clues.
So, I post this here and hope it can help you guys somehow.

Thank you for that.... I saved those sights just incase.... Learning more every day

I'd be wary of the software from those links Zippy.

2 of those links end up at the same executable (installer) & the 3rd one downloads a download manager type software that when you run it then wants to download the advertised program, but you have no confirmation what you'll be getting is what you actually want, in reality it could be downloading anything.

It seems like classic spammer/scammer hit n run tactics to me, sign up somewhere, blank profile, post once about a 'fantastic' product hoping to get people to download whatever it is, then vanish.
It would not surprise me if we hear no more from Marthaleer4.

The top link (the ucfix.com link), on the bottom of the page there's a "Sources and Citations" header with links underneath appearing to be reputable sources etc..
But if you mouse pointer the links they all start with www.ucfix.com....what that means is they are not reputable sources etc. but merely links to that same website deliberately created to make it appear the sources are credible.


If you want a good data recovery program to save that's legit & reliable with no hidden costs or scumware look into this one - PhotoRec.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Cheers

always had excellent results from this Freeware-site!
Definitely no Malware there!

http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/

http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html

It's been quite a while but it used to be, if you erased a file, only the first data bit was erased to the tell the system the file was gone which allowed recovery of the file later if needed.

However, formatting (the hard type) erased all data and left the storage blank. Maybe SD cards work differently.

Yes. Well, I don't know all the nuances of SD cards (heard there is less granularity of control when erasing data, like it has be to sector-wise on sd cards, I'm not sure)...

.... but you can still recover data on sd cards using the same tools you would use on a harddisk.


For anyone using linux (or who knows someone, or who is willing to run a liveCD) there is a GREAT utility called 'foremost' for recovering data. I actually had a guy take his drive to a 'professional' only to be told the data was not recoverable, but I ran foremost and recovered his data. Did this recently on the SD card from a friends camera.

It takes an incredibly long time to run, because it is very aggressive and thorough, largely ignoring the file system and analysing the raw data for signatures of known file types - then it pieces together the data for that file after finding the signature. (If I understand it correctly....)

All I know is that it works wonders!