Data Recovery Case File · Cameras, Drones & Cards · Formatted, Then Reused

Format plus one day's shooting: the honest arithmetic of overwriting — why the format itself destroyed almost nothing, why the next day's job is the real subtraction, and the validated harvest of every RAW frame it missed

Her enquiry told the truth in the first line and asked the hard question in the second. "I have mistakenly — personal error, not an electronic or physical error — formatted an SD card, not realising it contained client photographs that had not been transferred. I then had another job the next day and unfortunately used the same card. Is there any way to recover the lost data even after it having been overwritten?" The stakes: around 900 RAW photographs — client work — on a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB; the practical asks: cost and turnaround. Her question deserves the precise answer it's phrased for, because "recovered even after overwriting" has one: what's physically overwritten is gone, and everything else is recoverable — and on a 64GB card that hosted one further day's shooting, "everything else" is usually a substantial majority. This page walks the arithmetic honestly, harvest included.

The decode: what the format took, what the reuse took, and what survived both

The format's damage — smaller than it feels: the first honest surprise: a quick format destroys almost no photograph data. It erases the catalogue — the filesystem's index of names and locations — and declares the whole card "empty," but the 900 RAW frames themselves remained written across the memory, unlisted and intact, the moment the format finished. Had the card gone in a drawer that evening, this would be a near-total recovery and a short page. The format made her images invisible and vulnerable; it did not, by itself, destroy them.

The reuse — the real subtraction: the next day's job is where genuine loss entered, and its mechanism is blunt: a formatted card presents as empty, so the camera wrote the new shoot wherever it pleased — and wherever a new file physically landed, the old data beneath it ceased to exist. That's the one absolute in this archive's honest-limits vocabulary: overwritten means gone — no equipment, at any tier, reads beneath a new recording. But the subtraction has a size, and the size is the hopeful part: the loss is bounded by how much the second shoot wrote. A day's photography landing some gigabytes onto a 64GB card overwrites that fraction of the surface — and every one of the original 900 frames living outside its footprint survived entirely. The arithmetic isn't all-or-nothing; it's a map of footprints, and most of the card usually lies outside them.

How the survivors are harvested — and counted honestly: with the catalogue gone, the recovery works by content: the whole surface carved for RAW image signatures, each candidate frame identified by its own internal structure and — the standard her client work demands — validated by rendering, so nothing half-overwritten masquerades as recovered. The second shoot's files are identified and segregated (they're hers too, and their footprint is the map of the loss). And the delivery includes the document a professional in her position actually needs: a written manifest — frames recovered and verified, against the estimate of what the reuse took — so the conversation with her client proceeds on exact numbers rather than dread. Turnaround and the single fixed figure go in writing at assessment, as always.

On the bench

The card's working life ended at the door: imaged write-blocked behind the DeepSpar USB Stabilizer 10Gb, every surviving byte fixed before anything else. OSForensics carved the full image by RAW signature, and each candidate frame faced the validation her stakes required — rendered, confirmed whole, or honestly excluded where the second shoot's footprint had truncated it. The survivors were organised and counted, the new job's files segregated and returned alongside, and the written manifest completed: the recovered majority verified frame by frame, the unrecoverable remainder named and bounded. The arithmetic, done — and done in her favour, as the footprint map usually allows.

The outcome

The surviving client RAWs recovered, validated frame by frame, and delivered with a written manifest of exactly what the reuse had and hadn't taken. Free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT; on cards and sticks where content has been deleted or overwritten, the figure is payable upfront. The honest arithmetic, posted for every photographer who'll one day need it: a format erases the index, not the images; reuse is the real destroyer, and its damage is bounded by its footprint; overwritten is gone and everything else is recoverable — so the moment a format-in-error is discovered, the card stops, because every frame shot on it afterwards is subtraction you choose.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.