SD card files overwritten

[rb73]

I was recently deleting files from my sd card while plugged into my laptop but for some reason hundreds of other files which I never selected have been deleted too. Whenever I use Recuva it says that the  files are overwritten by files already existing on the SD card and unrecoverable. I haven't uploaded any new files to the SD card. Please help, I'm very confused about how this has happened. Is it possible to recover the files? 

[Augeas]

This is typical of a storage device formatted as FAT32. When files are deleted the first two bytes of the start address are set to zero (by the file system itself). When Recuva, or other recovery software, looks for the deleted files it goes to the wrong address and reports that the file is overwritten by live files.

There's not a lot you can do. You could try a deep scan but this will not find, or recover, any more than the first extent of a file, so results are limited. But it's worth a go.

[rb73]

Thanks for the quick reply. Sorry, I'm not very tech savvy. So I did a deep scan and the files are showing up but it says they are overwritten and unrecoverable. Should I try recovering them? Have the files actually truly been overwritten?

Also, why were the other files that I never selected deleted? Any ideas? The files that I actually did select for deletion were fully recoverable, it's just the files that were deleted automatically that have been overwritten. 

Edited September 24, 2023 by rb73

[Andavari]

You could try to recover them to another location such as into a New Folder on the Desktop, and then see what you get. While what you're attempting to recover may be overwritten "sometimes it's possible to get a part of a file back" such as partially recovering a text document, etc.

As to why other files elsewhere were also deleted automatically without selecting them is unknown. Unless of course the SD Card has some file corruption, or even some level of file system corruption which can sometimes be tricky to figure out with NAND Flash based drives (SD Card, SSD, USB Flash Drive, etc.,) and sometimes traditional error scanning tools find nothing wrong.

[rb73]

Thank you. It's all very strange, I've lost hundreds of photos and videos. I don't think it's a corrupted SD card issue as it's actually happened with 2 cards that I've been working on. Is there any possibility at all that the files will be fully recoverable despite what the scan reports? Is Recuva the best option for recovery? If I try recovering them now and it's unsuccessful will that mean any future attempts by other means will not be possible and the files will be lost forever? 

[rb73]

Also, do I need to have the SD card inserted in the laptop when trying to recover the files, or will the files be on the laptop hard drive? 

[Andavari]

As long as there's no further writing to the SD card you can safely use Recuva or whatever other tool to attempt the recovery.

Recovering will not make it impossible to try different tools to attempt recovery. There are other tools available, some are freeware and it would be advised to use whatever you can to get your files back.

You would need the SD card inserted in order to recover files from it.