Oops... Formatted Card but didn't want to do that

Is there a way to unformat an SD card? I have a Canon SD 1200 IS and by habit I formatted the card before I copied the files to my laptop. Any suggestions? They weren't all that important. Just some snap shots I took while driving on my trip. But some were pretty cool.

Hmmm. Well, Lightroom Saves The Day!!! Apparently they were already on the hard drive in a catalog. I'm dumping them from LR to my Desktop now. Thank goodness.

For reference, there's Recuva:

http://www.piriform.co​m/recuva

Recuva works great.

Wow, When I originally read the op I was like, no theres nothing you can do *face palm* but this is new to me & very interesting to know that recuva exists. cheers

mitchrapp wrote in post #15995790
For reference, there's Recuva:

http://www.piriform.co​m/recuva

Will it actually work for a card after low level formatting? The site says it works for recovering deleted files, which is different from a formatted card.

Undelete and unformat utilities are different although the terminology is loosely used. I have never had occasion to need it but supposedly Photorec at http://www.cgsecurity.​org/wiki/PhotoRec will recover from a formatted card.

If I get some time later I'll run a test and see if that includes "low level format".

If you write zeroes over everything with a full format, it probably won't work. But most formats work like a delete in that they just tell the device that you can overwrite this area. Until you actually overwrite it, the data should be recoverable.

The SD card in my wife's camera showed an error last year on holiday (it had about 200 photo's on it and a couple of video@s).
When we got back home, windows could not read it and said it needed formatting.
I did a "quick format" in windows and then ran Recuva on the SD card.

The result, all photo's and video's recovered!