Recuva says files were overwritten

[Zizy Archer]

I have recently deleted photos from an SD card during upload to computer, which died during making backup of said photos (yes, lesson learned - always make another backup before deleting from SD card, even if time difference is 15 minutes). From SD card I managed to recover most photos, but there is weirdness with others: some photos taken in January were claimed to be overwritten by some later photos and videos. However, those photos were present on the SD card at the same time and got deleted together - the only possible way of overwrite I can imagine is if camera shuffled data during its delete process.

Is it possible to "force" Recuva to grab data that is on the supposed image spot, even if it is (partly) corrupt, or is that data surely lost and really got overwritten and destroyed? Deep scan returns the same files as fast one, so I fear those photos are indeed lost. I recovered files using the free version of Recuva, though I am willing to buy the paid one should it enable these extra thingies and help me save the remaining files.

[Guest johnccleaner]

It is actually very likely that the data was 'shuffled' as part of the SD card's deletion process. (Take a look at how Flash-based memory deletes and stores data, it's a fascinatingly complex process that doesn't seem like it should be able to be done at any speed, at yet it is.)

In any event, you can certainly tell Recuva to try to recover a file marked as Overwritten - just select it or check the checkbox for it. Recuva will then go to that file's last known location on the media and recover however much data the file was supposed to have occupied. This likely not to be usable (as it will likely be portions of several files), but it's worth a shot, certainly; as long as you don't recover to that same SD card, it's not going to hurt anything anyway.

In regards to buying Recuva Professional, it would, unfortunately, not be able to do anything that Free can't in this case. (The scanning and recovery process is entirely the same; you can use the Pro version's to make an 'image' of the SD card to preserve it as-is and then, say, put that SD card back into use on your camera, but it wouldn't affect whether or not it could recover the files in the first place.) As such, in truth, I'd have to recommend looking into a trustworthy and skilled data recovery service instead, as that would be more likely to recover these files if you need them.

[Zizy Archer]

Thank you for your answer. Over the weekend I have attempted recovering all photos - even those marked as irrecoverable and it turned out most actually could be recovered without issues, hooray! 

Pictures that were supposedly replaced by others that should have been present at the same time were fine (while files supposedly overwriting them were indeed lost due to video as reported). Some of listed conflicts were by older images, eg 9955 from few months ago supposedly overwrote recent 9457 (as filenames wrapped around). On the other hand, some of pictures marked by green weren't recovered immediately - actually all pictures after the first overwrite by a video file seemed lost. But fortunately those later pictures were found during deep scan and still got recovered. Seems as if the file system of the card was confused what is present where.