Secure Digital cards have taken the world of digital photography by storm. Be it any camera - point-and-shoot or DSLR - it supports an SD card. In fact, digital cameras of various brands are compatible with these highly reliable memory cards. These cards facilitate huge data storage capacity and better data transfer speeds. These cards have either FAT 16 or FAT 32 file system. However, at times the file system of these cards can get damaged. In such scenarios, an SD card can become corrupt, rendering vital data - photos and other files - inaccessible. To compensate the data loss in such scenarios, you can look up to a backup. And, if no clean and updated backup is available, you must consider downloading an SD card recovery software from the Internet.

Consider a scenario, wherein, you return from a family vacation with approx. 500 pictures stored on the SD card of your digital camera. One fine morning, you insert the SD card in your camera in order to transfer them to a computer, and realize that the count of the pictures has declined drastically. You do not take the matter seriously, and consider re-inserting the card. Surprisingly, this time again you see a different count, say only 30.

Cause

The above behavior can be experienced in the following situations:

1. An SD card is not formatted properly

2. SD card corruption due to damaged file system

When you click a photo, your camera stores it on the SD card whilst marking its entry in the file system's index table. If your camera is not able to show some pictures, it means their entries have got deleted from the file system. Fortunately, now-a-days, you have ways to perform SD card recovery.

Resolution

You can take the following steps in order to overcome the problem:

• Re-format the SD card in your digital camera

• Restore the lost data from a backup copy

• If you do not have a backup, use a third-party SD card recovery software
  

Such tools employ improved scanning algorithms and recover lost data from SD cards within a minimal amount of time. Above all, being read-only, they do not modify the original data.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a versatile application which recovers lost or deleted photos and other multimedia files from various memory card and digital camera brands. The SD card recovery application is available for both Windows and Mac users.