Secure Digital (SD) cards are Flash memory storage devices. They are widely used in all kinds of electronic media—computers, laptops, cameras, cell phones etc. The basic point is where there is technology, there are bound to be some technical mis-haps. Often small mistakes of ours (pulling out the card wrongly, accidentally formatting the card, etc), cause big problems. If you have a back-up at such times, you're spared the trauma of losing those pictures saved on the card. But when you don't have a back-up, or it's inaccessible, you tend to worry and get upset. At such times you should use an SD Card Recovery Software.

For example, when you remove the card from the camera, and then connect it to the computer to transfer photos. You see the content on your computer screen, then pull out the card presuming that the data has been transferred. Then you realize that the data was not transferred and try to re-connect the card to give it a second shot, but the pictures are not accessible now.

The photos are inaccessible because the card is corrupt. The reason for this is incomplete writing of the data from the memory card to the system. All hard drives have two principles on which data is transferred—Read and Write. The information is read from one disk and written onto the other. In this particular case, the data is read from the memory card and written to the computer hard disk. During this process, the card need to be connected to the system. Pulling out the card early breaks this process and thus your images are rendered lost.

This still doesn't mean your pictures are gone for good. You need to format the card to salvage your images. Formatting a used card means that all the data previously stored on it gets erased. After formatting the card, use a SD Card Recovery Software to perform a card recovery. This can be done by simply downloading the tool from the Internet, and then running it on the computer while the card is connected to it. These are utility software which have been designed for precisely this purpose. They scan the hard drive and retrieve all images from it. Once this is done, you can save them to a new folder or anywhere else you wish.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a card recovery tool which enables users to safely salvage data stored on their SD cards. The software gives thumbnail previews of the files which can be recovered, so you can select the one you want. It supports JPG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG etc.