SD Card Recovery on Mac OS X

From Canon digital cameras to professional Sony DSLRs or any other recording media, you possibly prefer SD card, as your multimedia flash storage. As it lets you capture high resolution digital images or videos with high speed (Faster read / write operation). And also facilitate high storage space and available in smallest sizes (Mini & Micro SD card).

Just imagine if you accidentally “Quick Format” your SD card, which is holding all your precious pictures from your best friend’s wedding, your birthday party, last tracking excursion and lot other random photos. That could be a total disaster right! Not just this scenarios, there are many others also which leads to data loss from your cameras / camcorders.

Let’s have a look on all those SD card data loss situation

You might have come across a situation like this; where unexpectedly a message popped out saying “Disk needs to be formatted”, as soon as you connected your SD card to your Mac computer. After that you ejected the SD card and once again inserted the card, but nothing changed and same message appeared. Then you realized that you need to format the SD card for using it again, thus losing all your pictures and video clips. This type condition mainly happens, due to hardware / software conflicts or if you switch between Mac OS and Windows.

Another most common situation is “Sync Error”, i.e. while trying to synchronize files from your camera / camcorder to the computer and you unexpectedly removed the SD card or disconnected the device, error will take place causing deletion of files from both the places. One more is “Compatibility Error” this happens if you use your SD card in different – different recording devices.

Other reasons for media file loss from SD cards are accidental deletion or in case you forcefully tried to store data to the SD card or used it when device battery power was low or if the file system of the SD card has gone corrupt.

Now how to get back your SD card files?

In the event of data loss from your SD memory card, there is no other way to get back those files rather than relying on a third party SD card recovery tool. Now the question arises which to choose? Definitely you feel like having a tool that can rescue data after format, deletion, corruption, loss, sync error etc. And also should restore files of all types whether it’s generic like JPEG, PNG, BMP, MP3, MP4, AVI, AIF, MPEG etc or the digital RAW image formats like CRW, CR2, NEF, ORF, ARW, DNG etc.

Yodot Mac Photo Recovery is a complete package of numerous features that makes you SD card recovery experience easier and effective, on your Mac OS X system. The software can recover over 200 different types of media files from various types of SD cards i.e. SDSC, SDHC, SDXC, SDIO etc and can even easily handle high-capacity SD cards. On the plus side the software is made available to you for free trial, so that you may check the recovery results prior to purchasing the software.

Guidelines on SD card recovery Mac

  • At first you need to download Yodot Mac Data Recovery application to your Mac system and install it 
  • In order to restore photos or videos or any other file from your SD card, then you need to connect your SD card to the Mac machine through the built-in slot or with a USB adaptor
  • After attaching the SD card, launch the app from the Applications Folder
  • The main window appears with two options of SD card recovery; one is “Deleted Photo Recovery” and the other one is “Lost Photo Recovery”
  • Make your selection as per the data loss situation you are facing and continue further
  • Now, the software will search for all the drives present on your Macintosh, you can choose from the list of drives representing the SD card
  • As you select the SD card drive, then the app will ask for the file type you need to retrieve
  • You can select either the file types (i.e. pictures, music & videos, digital RAW images) or individual file formats (i.e. JPG, PNG, MP3, AVI, RAW, NEF etc) or skip this action and select all of them by default
  • Once you click next, the software starts scanning the SD card drive and recover all the files from it
  • Choose the files which are to be retrieved and preview them before proceeding to the save option
  • For saving the recovered files, avoid the same SD card from which you are recovering

Precautionary Measures

  • Use the write protection notch to secure the SD card from unwanted write operations
  • Do not remove the SD card unexpectedly while using it
  • Avoid storing your photos, videos etc in the SD card for a longer time; rather transfer them to your Macintosh on regular basis
  • If the SD card memory is full, then avoid forcefully saving files
  • Do not switch the SD card between different devices or dissimilar operating systems
  • Do not store any new data to it; otherwise lost / deleted files will be overwritten with the new ones

Other Popular Software

Yodot Photo Recovery (Windows)

Recover and restore deleted photos lost from your digital camera memory card or the images from your Windows PC. The software can recover all popular image types including popular audio and video files.

Yodot Mac File Recovery

The only undelete application for Mac that can recover deleted files from HFS+, HFSX partitions on Mac. The software also has the ability to recover lost files using RAW signature method.