[Na Horuk]

Recently I had a nice trip and I made a dumb mistake. Instead of pressing Clean sensor, I pressed Format. Immediately after formatting, I took the card out of the camera and did not use it since.
After smacking my head against various walls, I tried card recovery software on the computer. It should be simple, right? Everyone says that formatting is not really a true, 100% deletion. But I can't get all my photos back!

I tried Pandora, Recuva, Image Rescue 5 (software that I got with some Lexar card), Photorec and others.. and only some photos were successfully recovered, not all. The dng files have good file sizes (some of the recovery programs failed more than others), but some of the dng files end up being just pure white.
Lightroom shows the jpeg previews for all recovered files normally, but once imported, the image is completely white. Nothing but white. I haven't counted how many files are corrupt like this, but out of the appx. 770 recovered files, a good number of them are bad. And I can't even be sure that all of them were recovered, maybe there are some that are completely missing.

Does anyone have similar experiences? Do I have to change something in the dng file to make Adobe Camera raw recognize them correctly? I tried LR, PS, and the Adobe DNG converter, and they all failed to work with those files.
Or are these just files that I have deleted from the camera throughout the days, before formatting it? This is the only thing that I hope for. It was such a dumb mistake and I lost half of my trip.

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Last edited by Na Horuk; 04-25-2016 at 03:49 PM.

[Adam]

Everyone says that formatting is not really a true, 100% deletion. But I can't get all my photos back!

It certainly isn't complete deletion, but there's no guarantee of being to recover every single file after a format.

I think if you managed to get 770 files back, and most of them are intact, that's a pretty good result! And it's certainly possible that the corrupt files were just fragments of files deleted previously. Do the filenames / dates give you any clues?

[UncleVanya]

One important point. Most of the advice given tells you to NOT write the files back to the SD card - assuming you did not you can keep trying new recovery techniques. The reason format is not fully destructive is that it uses a table to track file locations. Depending on the level of deletion done during use the files are mostly sequential blocks. However if you have been deleting as you go then you left holes that get partial files dropped into them and that complicates recovery. DNG/PEF etc may be a format that is too random in terms of data for the intelligent wizards to determine much about so rebuilding the files may be a bit of a guessing game based on sequential blocks and sizes.

Also this "White file" problem seems to indicate corruption: How can I recover corrupted DNG files?: Pentax SLR Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review

[Not a Number]

A few years back it searched on "Best photo recovery tools" and tested the 5 most commonly listed utilities. Of these Photorec was the clear stand out. I had no problem recovered PEF files from formatted cards. Many of the recovery programs only recognize the JPEG and TIF portion of the RAW file and recovering the files as such. The RAW data portion is supposed to be TIF compatible if the minimum "standard" of RAW files is honored.. Photorec recognizes the PEF format. I never tested DNG files.

You might try copying the recovered DNG files to a work directory and renaming them with a TIF extension. I played around trying various things or image editors but was never able to do anything with recovered files that open only as blank white.

[VoiceOfReason]

Change the file extension to .tiff and see what happens on one of them.

[rawr]

As you note, if the card has been in use for a while, much of what you are recovering may be fragments of old stuff going back to the day you first used the card, and hence not worth worrying about.

[Bengan]

I haven't tried it, but it sounds promising. How to Recover Files from Formatted SD Card - EaseUS

[Na Horuk]

I will try that Tiff thing.

Is there any software that allows a batch extraction of the jpeg previews? Those seem to be fine, so I would like to at least keep those, if the rest of the raw is corrupted.

Edit: Now that I looked at the images, it looks like far fewer were correctly recovered than I initially thought.

[rawr]

Is there any software that allows a batch extraction of the jpeg previews?

EXIFTOOL can do it, as can Jhead. Both are command line though. This guy provides a command line example of EXIFTOOL doing JPEG preview extraction that may work for you:

ExifTool example commands

EXIFToolGUI also allows batch JPEG preview extraction from DNG's, or used to in an older version that I currently have loaded.