Data corrupting has been with us for as long as humans attempted to store data onto a storage medium. The Sumerians were using blunt reeds to write wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, producing one of the earliest writing systems known as the cuneiform script. Even the slightest exposure to natural elements could unavoidably corrupt a clay tablet meticulously covered with hundreds of marks over a period of hundreds of hours.
As technology progressed and we’ve moved into the digital era, our first digital data storage methods weren’t tremendously more reliable. Most people born in the 70s or 80s can vividly remember how little it took it to destroy a floppy disk, and those who are even older, probably have their fair share of nightmarish stories about crumbled or torn punch cards and rolls of punched tapes.
Steps to Recover Files from a Corrupted SD Card
No matter the cause of the corruption, the solution is always the same: SD card data recovery software, such as Disk Drill. Software like this has been designed specifically to locate fragments of files on a half-functioning or non-functioning storage medium and recover them back.
Step 1. Connect a corrupted SD Card to your PC
Step 2. Install and launch Disk Drill data recovery software
Step 3. Select the corrupted memory card from the list of drives
Step 4. Preview your files and hit the “Recover” button in the program.
Using sophisticated data recovery algorithms and an extensive database of more than 200 file signatures, Disk Drill will recover all data that would otherwise be forever lost, and it will do so quickly, affordably, and on-demand.
Even though we now have at our disposal storage devices that hold enormous quantities of data and take up substantially less space, they can still become corrupted and unreadable. A part of the problem is physical damage. A bent, twisted, burned, drowned, frozen, or otherwise decimated SD card has a very slim chance of ever working again.
Luckily, this kind of damage is easily avoidable. What’s not so easily preventable are manufacturing defects, accumulated failure, and firmware bugs. These sources of data corruption are not something a regular user can do much about. Manufacturers try to minimize the negative impact of these common causes of SD card data corruption, but no solution is perfect.
Modern SD cards are so cheap because advanced manufacturing processes allow manufacturers to store a lot of information on a tiny space. In fact, all SD cards have extra storage space to compensate for bad sectors and manufacturing defects. When one “storage unit” goes bad, the SD card permanently shuts it down and, instead, uses a backup storage unit.
When more of these storage units become corrupted than the SD card can compensate for, you often start seeing the effects of data corruption with your own eyes. Images may become pixilated and full of artifacts, videos may skip, music may sound distorted, and documents may refuse to open. In extreme cases, your files may even completely disappear.
FAQ
In many cases, it’s still possible to recover data from a corrupted memory card without formatting it, but only with the help of SD card recovery software. Such software can read the SD card at the file system level and detect all files that are present on it — even those that have been marked as deleted.
Yes, it’s often possible to recover photos from a corrupted memory card, but you need to avoid formatting and, instead, download an SD card recovery software capable of undeleting all commonly used image file formats, such as Disk Drill (graphical user interface) or PhotoRec (command-line user interface).
There are several capable software applications that you can use to restore data from a corrupted SD card, including:
- Disk Drill (graphical user interface)
- PhotoRec (command-line user interface)
- Windows File Recovery (command-line user interface)
Unfortunately, the Android operating system doesn’t give its users a lot of options to fix a corrupted SD card. In most cases, it simply suggests formatting the SD card, which is the last thing you want to do if you still have important files on it. If possible, connect the SD card to your computer, and repair it using CHKDSK (Windows) or Disk Utility (macOS).
