SD Card data loss?

Forgive me, as I'm very new to photography in general and this has me stumped.

Long story short is that I just got back from a fishing trip to Yellowstone NP where I took roughly 300 pictures. While I was out there, everything seemed to be working fine. I was able to go back and review photos I'd taken and nothing seemed amiss.

Fast forward to a week later and I finally had some time to go and review/edit my photos. I put the SD card into my laptops card reader, and nothing. I tried it on a friends laptop, and nothing comes up. Then I put the card back into my camera, and now I can't review the pictures on there either. What gives? The camera is perfectly fine, the card reader still works (i tried two other SD cards). Just that one card seems to be corrupted. Are those pictures now lost? Is there anything you can recommend that I try that I may not have tried already?

Thanks!

The camera is a Canon 70D, in case that matters to anyone.

Start here. There are also some other threads on data recovery tools in this forum. You have a card reader, which is a good start.

What's the capacity of the card? Has it ever worked in either of the laptop card readers you tried?

It's a 32gb card, and has worked flawlessly for the past year and a half. This is the first time that it won't read on my laptop. Never tried it on anyone elses before now.

My hesitancy with spending spending money for a data recovery program, is not that it costs money. It's that since my computer won't recognize the card at all, I don't see how it would work. It seems those programs are built more for cards that have been formatted on accident or files were deleted.


Thanks for the quick help though! It's definitely a start, and I'll keep looking through some of those programs in that thread.

Most quality cards come with a basic to good data recovery program. I know that SanDisk, Kingston and Lexar do. You need to download it and enter a key to use it. The info is on the package.

If you can't find the info you need for the card you have go buy a new one (you're going to do that anyway) and get the software that comes with it to use for your bad card. It may or may not work. As you mentioned, not even being able to see the card on your computer is a bad sign but that does not make it impossible.

Good luck.

bpalermini wrote in post #17633549
Most quality cards come with a basic to good data recovery program. I know that SanDisk, Kingston and Lexar do. You need to download it and enter a key to use it. The info is on the package.

If you can't find the info you need for the card you have go buy a new one (you're going to do that anyway) and get the software that comes with it to use for your bad card. It may or may not work. As you mentioned, not even being able to see the card on your computer is a bad sign but that does not make it impossible.

Good luck.

I'll buy a duplicate SanDisk and try their program out as you mentioned. I didn't even realize cards came with programs like that, so thank you.

PhotoRec and TestDisk from cgsecurity don't have the most refined of interfaces, but they will do a fine job with data recovery. They are free and open source, and have been my go-to software for such tasks for awhile now.

Just be warned that they will recover ALL intact, but 'deleted' files supported by the software. So if you're recovering files for someone else then I strongly suggest letting the owner look through the images on their own to avoid excessive embarrassment.

Which Sandisk card? Ultra or Extreme?