Recuva - Free Software to Recover Deleted Files from Formatted SD Cards

The D7100 i bought half a year ago offers dual memory card capacity and i had been diligently using the second one for backing up until the recent Ipoh-KL-Cameron Highlands trip when i almost ran out of memory juice. 

I conveniently stopped the back-up function and it didn't take too long for me to regret the decision; the appearance of the dreaded message (above) when i tried to retrieve photographs from the SD card! 

Frantic was the appropriate word to describe my train of thoughts then; a few hundred pictures resided in the card and they ranged from my last day in USS as an annual pass holder and a few food trips including one to Lady M!  

Well, i HAD to format the card in order to read it again and i know i have to find a good recovery software that is able to retrieve all the formatted files. As a poor man who takes public transportation to work, free was the key word i punched on google search. 

That's when i found Recuva! 

Run the installation file and the steps are super duper easy to follow via the wizard mode. 

Select the problematic drive and check 'run deep scan'! Do note that deep scan can take a long time to search for all the deleted files (including all the pornographic files that you assumed had been trashed).

Once that's completed, a whole chain of files would be available for you to highlight for recovery. Keep in mind the "state" of the file. Excellent would obviously translate into a higher chance for recovery.

Thanks to Recuva; i managed to retrieve the main bulk of the missing photographs!

There were a few indicated as "excellent" yet turned out to be unusable for publishing. However, i am definitely not complaining as i am just glad to get most of my pictures back! 

For download, please visit 

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

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Note

There were a few occasions after the deep scanning that i realised there was no way for me to preview or retrieve the files. The error message that was shown when i attempted to retrieve was:

"the volume for the file has been externally altered so the opened file is no longer valid."

Don't freak out! What happened in my case was that the connection for the SD card adapter broke intermittently and in the inflexible mind of Recuva, any file found thus far was invalid. Moral of the story? Invest in a good card adapter!