Hoping for help with Broken RAW files (CR3)

Hey Team!

Feeling a little silly after shooting a recent job on a dollar store card. I was in a pickle and just grabbed a card. It shot fine & I could review photos but when I got back to the studio, none of the files are readable.

I tried some file recovery methods to no avail.

I'm hoping some expert can get me out of this jam, the files sizes are what they should be and I was able to get them off the card fine, the first 3 images work, the other 200 ish are total duds. Nothing showing at all.

I have them in a dropbox link if someone is willing to take a look.

Thank you so much!

Unfortunately file recovery can only recover files... it can't repair them.

When a file allocation table gets corrupted the files are still there and can be recovered. When the drive hardware fails... the platter can be removed and the data read from it. But, when the original version of a file is corrupted as it is being written to the memory card, there is nothing to recover*.

Your best bet it to go back to the card and try copying the files off using a different cable/card reader (in the hope that they were corrupted during copying, rather than when being written to the card).

* If the RAW files are corrupted it may still be possible to extract the JPG preview file created by the camera. Can the images be viewed on the camera?

Sadly the images cannot be viewed on the camera either. I think I'm hooped. I was using some file restoration software that detects and fixes errors in hex code I think. There's a chance the hex can be manually fixed too, but I have no way of knowing how to do that.

Thanks for the reply Dan!

Sadly I think you are hooped. If a file header is damaged it can be replaced but if image data is destroyed there really isn't anyway to repair it because there is no way to know what the original data would have been.

Try Puran File Recovery, it did the job on by broken cards