Not only did that SD card contain a bunch of product photos we’d just taken for various HTG tutorials but it also had a bunch of great holiday photos we hadn’t yet properly dumped and backed up: quite the double whammy of bad luck. Or, when attempting to access the card in Windows, you may see a message: You need to format the drive before you can use it. The problem with doing something you should know better than to do is that eventually it catches up with you. Part 1: SD Card Not Formatted Sometimes, when trying to access your SD card on the camera, you may get the following message: Card not formatted. Despite the fact that we know better than to physically eject the SD card from our camera before powering the camera off we do so all the time. That screenshot, by the way, isn’t a mock up of what could happen, it’s a very unsettling look at exactly what did happen to us shortly before writing this article.

You’re likely here via search engine query and panicked because you plugged in your SD card and either the files were outright missing or instead of the familiar file structure like /DCIM/ with the subsequent folders for your camera model and then the image files, you see something like this: In the case of recovering files off your corrupted SD card, there’s little sales pitch needed. Many of our tutorials center on things that are useful or even fun but that might need a little explaining for the unfamiliar.

Recover footage from sd card