Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

i had a relatively old (c. 2015) 32 gb sd card in a vlog camera with pictures and videos on it dating from may 2022 to nov 2023 and realized in nov 2023 that the pictures from june 2022 to mar 2023 had completely disappeared. i used the camera from mar to nov 2023 so some overwriting is possible, but i don't know when the pictures disappeared, so it's not clear how much. i suspect the pictures were stolen by my creepy landlord for reasons id rather not contemplate, but i don't know when, and i can't rule out data corruption. i ran the card through a handful of recovery options (chkdsk, recuva, photorec) and recovered some unopenable chk files, some usable deleted files via photorec (but not what i wanted) and a pile of ridiculous files using recuva that are full of non-ascii characters, are dated to impossible time frames like 1980 and 2035 and have clearly wrong file sizes like 4 gb. i understand that this suggests that my partition table got corrupted.

i actually copied these files from the sd card to an external drive and then formatted the drive to wipe out any pointers to bad data. i'm hoping i can do something like copy the files back to the sd card and then run a chkdsk. does that make any sense?

i want to take a step back and ask a more basic question. these 2-5 gb files dated to 1980 or 2035 anf full of non-ascii characters appear to be what they say they are. i understand that they're just corruption in the partition table, but did i actually copy data to my external drive when i copied them or is it just a bunch of zeroes?

I assume a vlog camera is a camera that is constantly recording and when it gets full, it deletes older videos to free up space for newer content. If that is the case and the card is full, the older content will be overwitten and impossible to recover at this point in time.

no, it's point and click and use was sporadic. it's possible that some data was overwritten, but i would expect to be able to recover more than i have.

what do these 4 gb garbled character files actually consist of? is there some way to extract data from them?