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In short, my new puppy chewed up my SD card. I took the card out of the camera after a shoot to back it up onto an external hard drive. I then decided to grab a glass of water. As I was filling up the cup, the dog hopped and snatched the card with his mouth. When I grabbed the card out of his mouth, it was clearly damaged with bite marks on the card.

  • OS X can't see or recognize the card
  • Windows 7 can see that there is an SD card plugged in but doesn't return any information on the disk itself

Luckily for that day I was shooting with two cameras. This card only has about 100 images but it had all my wide angle shots, while the other camera had the 70-200.

I've tried recuva and ZAR with no success.

What are your recommendations to recover the data from my card? Any services (close to Canada) I can send my card to for potential repair?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I suspect you're out of luck on repair. What you might be able to get done is file recovery, so I'd look to that option. \$\endgroup\$
    – Joanne C
    Commented Jul 17, 2013 at 15:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ JoanneC: I changed my question accordingly \$\endgroup\$
    – dassouki
    Commented Jul 17, 2013 at 15:46
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    \$\begingroup\$ Related: If I swallowed my SD Card would it be readable when it emerged? :) \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Commented Jul 17, 2013 at 19:22

2 Answers 2

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You can use a professional service, but I would suggest first trying out a bit more. Of course, this increases the risk of causing more damage! So, if those wide angle shots on there are not worth hundreds of dollars to you, you can't go wrong with trying a bit more yourself.

Note, that you are not the only one with a similar problem. Here is a comprehensive look at different options for Linux. If you are on a different operating system, this would be a good reason to switch ;) Of course, similar programs exist for Windows and Mac OS but they often have to be bought.

I personally had luck with photorec before.

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I would recommend sending your SD card into a reputable drive recovery service. There isn't much else you can do at this point as a home user unless your skills and equipment is very advanced.

One service that I would recommend that is close to Canada(Minnesota) and also very highly regarded is Kroll Ontrack. I am not affiliated with them in any way. The repair would come in two steps:

  1. Evaluation, including analysis and list of what is recoverable for $65 USD
  2. Recovery costing from $200-$800 USD

DriveSavers is another very popular option, although they are located in California, a bit further away from most of Canada.

Beyond that you likely won't find much more info on this site.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I concur with this post. If you are lucky, the damage may be mostly to the controller. They may be able to wire up to the flash storage directly and pull some data, but it's likely not going to be possible to get data back from software tools since there is extensive physical damage. There unfortunately aren't any cheap options when it comes to physical recovery like this though and success is still not a sure thing. If the flash memory itself is damaged, there is likely nothing that can be done. \$\endgroup\$
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Commented Jul 17, 2013 at 16:20

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