Can you recover deleted photos from an SD card?
Data storage may be more reliable than ever before but, as
we know, it still fails. Mechanical fault, power surges and technical errors
are all common causes of data loss but, ultimately, the most common cause of
data loss is still – and, in our opinion, will remain to be – human error.
As a result, we regularly recover data that people have
accidentally deleted and, more often than not, the data in question is largely
comprised of image files which, considering the amount of sentimental value
these files undoubtedly hold, should come as no surprise. What may well come as
a surprise, though, is that, yes, you can usually recover deleted data from an SD card.
When data is deleted (accidentally or otherwise), the binary that forms it is not
immediately removed from the device in question. Instead, the device earmarks
the space within which it was stored (commonly known as sectors) as a location
that can be used to store data in the future. As a result, this means that,
provided you have noticed the problem quickly, that the data in question can be
recovered. The likelihood of a successful recovery diminishes every time that
new data is written on to the SD card, however, and this is true of all types
of storage media. To put it another way, as soon as you realise you’ve deleted
data you want to keep, power down the affected drive and take action.
So, we’ve established that deleted photos can be recovered
from an SD card provided the original files haven’t been overwritten – but how?
The answer: by putting the relevant files back together piece by piece.
All data is made up of individual bytes, each of which
represents either a one or a zero. What our engineers must therefore do is
identify the locations of the accidentally deleted files and then place the
bytes in the correct order. Once this has been done, the files can once again
be accessed and viewed.
With a high-definition image file usually several megabytes
in size and one megabyte equating to a million bytes, doing this manually would
be such a time-consuming and laborious task that it would simply not be
possible to offer such services affordably. Fortunately, specialist software
can- when used by an experienced and trained engineer – do a lot of the hard
work making the process much more practicable.