SD card quick formatted, no recoverable data

aoc99

New member
Hi all,

First post on here, in desperation I must admit. Today, I got a new mobile (Moto G6) after damaging an older Moto G3. The older device still worked okay, just with a poorly responding screen but all the data in question here was intact and accessible.

I put my existing SD card in the new mobile, set the phone up, but after a while needed to do a reset as I'd set some settings incorrectly during the setup wizard, and couldn't find the relevant menu so just figured it would be quicker to reset.

Unfortunately, the warning 'this will delete all your user settings' actually meant, settings plus all content on external devices. As soon as I pressed it, and the screen stated "erasing SD card", I pulled the SD card out in a panic - it wasn't in for any more than 10 seconds whilst erasing...

The card had about 8GB of photos on it, and whilst I usually religiously backup once a month, haven't done so in 9 months. The card is full of sentimentally valuable pictures ranging from family, work, weddings etc.

The card is a 16GB UHC microSD, class 3 device, so even if my new Moto G6 has started a low level format (though I've no idea if the Moto G6 runs a quick format, or low-level format - thought I suspect it's not the latter), 10 seconds at 30MB/s isn't enough to write 1s and 0s over my data!

I've spent all day running recovery programs, and so far none of the following have 'found' anything other than the new 4 system folders my new phone placed on the card.

- Recuva
- Recoverit
- Disk Drill
- ZARx
- EaseUS

My question is, am I well and truly stuffed at this point?

I've spent considerable time in my career working with embedded MCUs, embedded flash etc, and even a device using an SD card, and so having written SPI libraries & protocols to transfer data in and out of these cards, I understand the speed limitations of these devices, know how long it takes to truly clear data from these devices, yet all indication right now is the card truly is well and truly empty of all data which makes no sense?

Losing the contents of this card would be an enormous shame :(

Thanks in advance for any replies!
All the best
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Were you running the card in an encrypted state? If you were, all the phone needs to do is change the DEK (data encryption key) and the files are permanently unrecoverable. Technically they'd still be there but encrypted with a key no one on earth has.
 
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