The other day I deleted by mistake all my images on a SD Card prior to moving the files to my local computer. I could recall that a couple of years ago there have been some free tools on the market, but today a quick goggling revealed first paid services/software only. Especially for the make it took me a minute longer to find that tool I successfully used some years ago:
PhotoRec is a file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its ‘Photo Recovery’ name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.
It works perfectly on any Mac, but you have to ensure that on Intel-based Macs, the emulation Rosetta is installed – otherwise you’ll get an error message.
The following explanations show you step-by-step how-to proceed.
Please note that probably you have to type ./photorec to start the program – this is needed to make photorec run in the bash. Typing photorec only (as suggested on the site above) might not be sufficient (depends on your configuration – standard configuration will need ./photorec).
