Two identical cards, one already shot and one empty, and a format confirmed on the wrong one. It takes about two seconds and it looks completely final — which is why so few people realise the images are still sitting there.
← All case files · £250 + VAT, flat
A wedding photographer swapped cards between the ceremony and the reception, and formatted what she believed was the spare. It held the entire ceremony — roughly 800 frames in RAW, including the vows and the signing.
She realised within minutes, but had already begun shooting the reception on the same card before stopping. That detail mattered more than the format itself.
the file allocation structures had been rewritten, but not a single image had been erased — the data sat exactly where it had been written.
those had landed at the start of the free space, overwriting the earliest images of the ceremony.
no controller fault, no bad blocks, no physical damage — purely a logical situation.
Cameras use quick formats because the card has to be usable again immediately. That rewrites the index and marks everything as free space, but erasing 64 GB of flash properly would take minutes rather than the second or two it actually takes — which is the whole reason these recover.
The card was imaged read-only first, and every subsequent step ran against the copy. With the original index gone there was nothing to rebuild, so the images were carved by signature: the image was scanned for the byte patterns that begin SanDisk-written RAW and JPEG files, and each frame reconstructed outward from its header.
RAW files carve particularly well because they are large, contiguous and have highly distinctive structures. The reception frames written afterwards were identified and excluded, and the ceremony images ordered by their embedded capture timestamps rather than by position on the card.
About 97% — every frame except those the reception shooting had landed on, which were the first images of the ceremony arrival. The vows, the signing and the group shots were all intact.
Images were verified by rendering rather than counting, and returned sorted chronologically from their EXIF data, which restored a usable sequence despite the original folder structure being gone.
A formatted card is not an erased card, and realising that quickly is worth more than any technique. What cost this photographer 3% was not the format — it was the forty frames shot afterwards, each of which landed on top of something.
If you format the wrong card: take it out, label it, and do not put it back in a camera. Decline any offer to repair or format it, and don’t run recovery software that writes to it. Memory cards are from £250 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Bring the drive into our Oxford Science Park reception, or send it by post — finding out what went wrong costs nothing. You’ll get a written figure from our fixed bands before any work starts.