-1

I had files, about five of them I've been working on for ages and storing on an SD card. The files are interconnected, like on file has others as include files, and 2 backup files. After a sudden computer power reset, all these files went mysteriously missing. File recovery software could not find them. What happened and how could I get them back? I don't remember whether the system was saving to one file during the interruption.

Glorfindel
  • 4,089
  • 8
  • 24
  • 37
  • 1
    recuva works pretty well, but if you said recovery software didn't work, what are you looking for, exactly? – Zachary Craig Nov 06 '17 at 13:52
  • A .bb file (blitzbasic). It had 2 backups, and 2 other bb include files. All just disappeared. –  Nov 06 '17 at 14:08
  • The first thing you must do is to set the write-protect switch; then make a back-up image of the contents and use this to create a sector-by-sector copy on another SD and do any recovery work on this, so that if the recovery makes things worse you can recreate the copy and start again. You haven't declared your OS, so I cannot suggest recovery software. An SD card can be used to back up files stored elsewhere, but should _never_ be used as the only storage location of a file - it is much too unreliable a medium. – AFH Nov 06 '17 at 14:58
  • I've had a lot of success with Runtime Software's GetDataBack products. They are free to try and you only need to purchase a license if you find the file and want to recover it: https://runtime.org/index.html – Zhro Nov 07 '17 at 01:36
  • 2
    Possible duplicate of [Recover data from SD card](https://superuser.com/questions/40058/recover-data-from-sd-card) – Dmitry Grigoryev Jul 22 '19 at 07:33
  • Also see [How do I recover lost/inaccessible data from my storage device?](https://superuser.com/q/241817/364367) – fixer1234 Jul 22 '19 at 07:42

1 Answers1

3

Can I ever recover my missing files from SD card? ... File recovery software could not find them

No

You could try different recovery software, especially software explicitly designed for recovering from flash-memory, but the prospects of success are probably low (depending on what exactly you already tried).

Your best bet is to recover any important files from the backups you made to other media (in case of media failure) and to other locations (in case of fire, burglary etc) and in several offline generations (in case of unnoticed accidental or malicious corruption).

RedGrittyBrick
  • 81,981
  • 20
  • 135
  • 205
  • Once I was one of those promoting the backup of "important files". After a partition on my system got severely damaged, I realized I was wrong. I could only restore "important files" but had to reinstall other stuff and lose some non important things. It was very annoying and time consuming. Nowadays, I tell people to backup *whatever* even if it is not important. Anyways +1 from me. – Andrea Lazzarotto Nov 07 '17 at 10:19