For example, it’s much harder to recover data from an SD card if you’ve recently taken new photos and saved them to the card since the card’s file system will be overwritten.

Never try to save new data onto an SD card that you’re trying to recover data from.

Note however that not all cameras or SD cards work this way and in most cases, they delete all data. The actual photo and movie data remain unchanged which is where SD recovery software can help. Sometimes they just remove the filenames and file entries such as the file name, time stamp, file length etc.

In the case of digital images, most digital cameras do not wipe pictures completely from your storage card.

Many things can cause data to be lost on an SD card but the most common causes are physical damage to the card, incorrect removal or insertion, a camera that incorrectly formats or reformat cards, memory card corruption, file structure errors, viruses, sudden removal or turning cameras off unexpectedly and switching SD cards between different devices.

There are no guarantees that any of the software featured here can recover data from your SD card but the SD recovery software for Mac reviewed here are the best in the business at doing so.

The chances of recovering all or some of your data depends on many things such is the type of SD card, the file type, how the data was deleted, whether additional data has been saved on top of lost files among many other things. If your files or images are badly corrupted or the SD card damaged, it’s usually impossible to restore data from SD cards. We have not featured these types of vendors here as they are taking open source software released under the GNU license and then repackaging it as their own. There are some unscrupulous developers out there that claim to offer paid Mac SD recovery software but in actual fact just wrap their own interface around free open source recovery software.

Most free SD recovery software can usually only be used via the command line in Terminal though and so they aren’t user-friendly to those without technical knowledge although PhotoRec has recently introduced a simple graphical user interface. However, there are a few open source tools which can recover data from SD cards which we’ve included here. The most they will allow for free is recovery of a few files. SD card data recovery is a complex process and although most SD recovery software have free trials although the trials usually only let you see or preview which files can be recovered if any. Before you choose which SD recovery software to use, there’s a few useful things to know about to avoid disappointment and improve your chances of recovering lost data.

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