So after many years of trouble free data issues. I got bitten today.

Was filming for a high profile client and they asked to offload footage from SD card to HD on one of their laptops – anyway it wouldn’t work – maybe locked down or whatever. Decided to bring it home and the card is showing as ‘needs formatting’. Can’t read it all. (this is after checking footage in camera before laptop.)

My error was to not enable write-protect at the client.

I’m not having much success with my own recovery software and am looking at Data Recovery specialists. Never used one, always used decent media and good back-up etc.

Question: anyone had any experiences of this type of business, and are they just more than people running recovery software in an office?

Any other ideas welcomed. Willing to pay too.

Thanks.

Can you put the card back in whatever wrote it in the first place to see if it can still read it?

Still time to edit the thread title to stop everyone getting excited

Checked in camera. Asking for re-format.

Bummer. I’ve never used any before but this has come up a few times before with recommendations. If no one replies here try putting ‘site:singletrackworld.com data recovery’ into Google to pull up the old threads

Same thought Liftman. First advice would be stop drinking NOW

Still time to edit the thread title to stop everyone getting excited

🙂

I’ve used Kronos data recovery for hard drive with some success. Not cheap. may have been possible without those extremes but for what we needed it for and the speed / confidence of recovery it was worth it. how much is it worth to get the data back?

Around £300+ whatever cost of professional integrity … thousands!!

Make an exact byte by byte copy of your card to work on; don’t use the original. In Linux I’d use dd for this – not sure about other OSs.

In Windows I’ve had the best results with GetDataBack by Runtime Software but after the last Windows crash I switched to Ubuntu so I’m not sure what’s current.

Good luck.

Companies like on-track are more than just someone in a garage with standard recovery software. They have lots of gizmos for cloning media and more sophisticated recovery software (as well as the knowledge in how to use it) and clean-rooms as well should they need to open stuff up. It’s very expensive but also pretty impressive in what they can recover. Yours might be a pretty simple one to if the laptop has just written something to the FAT area rather than doing anything with the image files