Recover photos from corrupt SD card?

[specialk4362]

Hi. Many of the photos/videos I have taken in past few days are showing up in gallery with gray background and exclamation mark. Some of them were weird when I took them, with half of photo blacked out, or showing up with colored bars. From what I read, I either have a corrupted micro SD card and/or there is an issue with the auto upload to Google Photos.

I tried using Recuva but only a few were fixed, despite the program saying most of them were fixable. Weird thing is, I just put the SD card back in my phone and was able to see some of the lost pics/videos. I quickly saved them to an album (which saves to my internal storage, not SD card) and moved them to my computer, but the video didn't save and when I go back to look at my gallery on phone, they are all greyed out again.

There are also other photos that show up in my camera gallery but when I transfer to my computer, they are not viewable. Any advice is appreciated!

 

[Dannydet]

So Google photos is not able to automatically back up your photos?
Try getting on a pc and goto photos.google.com and checking out what is backed up...

 

[specialk4362]

So Google photos is not able to automatically back up your photos?
Try getting on a pc and goto photos.google.com and checking out what is backed up...

Thanks. I already checked google photos on PC. The pics I've taken recently (where I noticed things were acting wonky) are not there. However, the photos I took earlier in the month, which show up on phone but are not viewable when I transferred to PC, are in google photos. So that is good! But really wanting to recover the more recent pics and videos. Also need to know if I need a new SD card to prevent this problem in future or if there is another issue going on.

 

[ocnbrze]

on your phone go into google photos. on the top right corner select your avatar or account. you should see an option to backup your photos.....that is if it does not automatically back it up. not sure but sometimes i have to go here to start the backup process.

 

[Dannydet]

If the SD card is corrupt, then yes, you will lose your photos and videos.
Cards will fail and sadly will happen

 

[Hadron]

The first thing I'd do is buy a new microSD card, and be careful who you buy it from (there are a lot of fakes out there, especially small online sellers). I simply would not trust that card any more.

On that note, how full is the current card? Are we certain that it isn't a fake itself (i.e. a smaller card reprogrammed to look like a larger card), because data corruption is what happens with fake cards when their real capacity is reached. The relevance of this is that if that is the problem you've little chance of recovering the data because the corruption is due to overwriting of data (the phone doesn't know the card is full because it's been hacked to say that it isn't and so writes over existing data). Unfortunately the definitive test for this would destroy any data on the card, but if the problem started when the card usage passed a typical small card size (say 16GB or 32GB) that would be very suspicious.

Otherwise, to be honest the only thing I can think of is to try a different file recovery utility just in case it can retrieve something that Recuva can't. But I've no reason to believe that will work - Recuva has a decent reputation for recovering deleted files (I've only used it once myself, but it manage to retrieve almost everything after a family member accidentally erased their camera's memory card, bar one or two corrupted files that had probably been partly overwritten before I heard about the problem).

 

[puppykickr]

And don't forget to change your default storage area for the camera.

The internal memory of the device should be used as the default storage, and then the media sorted through and what you want to keep stored onto the card.

A SD card's life is measured in write cycles, and when you use a card as default storage you are using cycles unnecessarilly.

 

[specialk4362]

on your phone go into google photos. on the top right corner select your avatar or account. you should see an option to backup your photos.....that is if it does not automatically back it up. not sure but sometimes i have to go here to start the backup process.

Thanks. It was set to auto backup but I just turned that off and back on just in case.

 

[specialk4362]

The first thing I'd do is buy a new microSD card, and be careful who you buy it from (there are a lot of fakes out there, especially small online sellers). I simply would not trust that card any more.

On that note, how full is the current card? Are we certain that it isn't a fake itself (i.e. a smaller card reprogrammed to look like a larger card), because data corruption is what happens with fake cards when their real capacity is reached. The relevance of this is that if that is the problem you've little chance of recovering the data because the corruption is due to overwriting of data (the phone doesn't know the card is full because it's been hacked to say that it isn't and so writes over existing data). Unfortunately the definitive test for this would destroy any data on the card, but if the problem started when the card usage passed a typical small card size (say 16GB or 32GB) that would be very suspicious.

Otherwise, to be honest the only thing I can think of is to try a different file recovery utility just in case it can retrieve something that Recuva can't. But I've no reason to believe that will work - Recuva has a decent reputation for recovering deleted files (I've only used it once myself, but it manage to retrieve almost everything after a family member accidentally erased their camera's memory card, bar one or two corrupted files that had probably been partly overwritten before I heard about the problem).

Very interesting. According to my phone, 31.11 GB out of 250 have been used. I'm pretty sure this is a no name brand card bought off Amazon... I've copied everything from the card to my PC and am going to get a new better one. Thanks.

 

[specialk4362]

And don't forget to change your default storage area for the camera.

The internal memory of the device should be used as the default storage, and then the media sorted through and what you want to keep stored onto the card.

A SD card's life is measured in write cycles, and when you use a card as default storage you are using cycles unnecessarilly.

Thanks. I did not know this! I had my default storage for photos set to the card bc I didn't want the internal storage filling up so fast.

 

[puppykickr]

I found the best cards to be Sans Disk, from an actual brick and mortar store.

Yes, the price can be salty.
But the alternative is pretty darn sour, as you have discovered.

 

[ocnbrze]

newegg.com sells some pretty good cards at good prices. i have had great success with Kingston micro sd cards from there.

https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=kingston+microsd

 

[Hadron]

Very interesting. According to my phone, 31.11 GB out of 250 have been used. I'm pretty sure this is a no name brand card bought off Amazon... I've copied everything from the card to my PC and am going to get a new better one. Thanks.

Was that from Amazon or from a marketplace seller? It makes a difference: Amazon won't knowingly sell fake cards (occasionally fakes do get into legitimate supply lines), but resellers range from established legitimate businesses prepared to take Amazon's conditions for an extra outlet to the same fly-by-night scammers who infest eBay.

31.11GB is very suspicious indeed: a "32GB" card has an actual capacity of 29.7 GB, due to the fact that card capacity is quoted in decimal units (1 G = 10^9) but computers use binary (1 G = 2^30, which is slightly larger). Sometimes it's hard to tell which units a particular app is using, but since corruption will start when the physical capacity of a fake card is exceeded, you started having this problem recently, and you've used about 1.4 GB more than the real capacity of a 32GB card, that's either a nasty coincidence or my guess was unfortunately correct. If bought from a source who may not be trustworthy that's even more suspicious. I think a new card would be a good idea.