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How to Recover Files from a Formatted SD Card

Accidentally format a SD card? With right solutions, you can easily get formatted data back! Here are 2 working ways to fast recover a formatted SD card for free.

Nowadays, SD cards are popularly used in portable devices like digital cameras, smartphones, music players, car navigation systems, etc. With the high-capacity memory, it can store millions of photos, videos, music, and other files. However, if you ever visited Quora or some tech forums, you may notice that many people ask for help about formatted SD card recovery.

Recover a Formatted SD Card

Apparently, it’s a common situation that people accidentally format SD card and hope to recover lost files from a formatted SD card. Is it difficult to recover formatted SD card? How to recover a formatted SD card? This article is here to give solutions to fast recover a formatted SD card for free.

Simplify by saying, formatting a SD card means erasing every single file on it. You may have formatted your SD cards before. But do you know what does “format” exactly mean? And what will happen if a SD card is formatted? We can metaphor formatting like a handshake between the device and SD card. The moment you format a SD card, a new file system is allocated to your device and all the old data will be automatically deleted. So formatting is to make your device ready to use the new file system and the SD card will be reusable for saving new records.

There are various reasons to format a SD card. In most cases, people want to erase unwanted data or create more storage space. But to bear in mind, formatting does much more than this. If your SD card stops working properly due to a technical error inside the card or infection with a virus, formatting will be the fastest way to fix it. Regular formatting can also reduce the chance of seeing corrupt files. As different devices work with different file systems, it is necessary to change the file system to be compatible with the new device. Formatting ensures the SD card is ready for that particular device.

Reasons to Format SD Card


After the SD card is formatted, all data stored is inaccessible. This will be a matter if people accidentally format a SD card and erase some important files. Is it difficult to recover data from formatted SD card? The answer is No. You may still retrieve old data as the information is still stored on the card, just not within the same folders as before. However, recovering a formatted SD card will not work if new data is overwritten on the formatted SD card. You can recover a formatted SD card with the following solutions provides you haven’t used the SD card yet and rewritten the original files.


Way 1. Recover Files from Formatted SD Card with CMD

If you get your SD card formatted by accident, you can try to recover files from formatted SD card by CMD (command line/command prompt). Here is a detailed guide on how to use CMD to recover formatted SD cards.

Step 1. Connect your formatted SD card to the computer. Hit on the search icon and search “CMD”.

Step 2. After the command prompt window opens, enter the command “chkdsk G: /f/x/r”, replace G with the drive letter of the formatted SD card and after that, press enter.

Recover Files from Formatted SD Card with CMD

Step 3. After completing the procedure, you should be able to see all the formatted files on a newly generated folder on the SD card.

There are some limitations to using CMD to retrieve formatted files. As you can see from the above, the process is complicated for beginners. What’s more, recovering data from formatted SD cards by CMD is not working all the time and CMD doesn’t support the recovery of selective files from the formatted SD cards as well.

Way 2. Recover Formatted SD Card with Data Recovery Software - 100% Working

If CMD doesn’t work for you, data recovery software is an alternative way. iTop Data Recovery will be your best choice in this case. It is the most reliable method to recover formatted SD card and the outstanding feathers have made iTop Data Recovery become a complete solution for data recovery.

Simple to Use

iTop Data Recovery makes the recovery process extremely simple. What you need to do is just a few clicks. Everybody can become a data recovery master at home.

100% Safe and Offline Data Recovery

iTop Data Recovery is a clean and virus-free software. The entire recovering process is safe and reliable. Data is completely recovered offline which means users will have full control over the data recovery process. There is no registration required for iTop Data Recovery as well.

Ultra Fast Speed with Up to 95% Success Rate

iTop Data Recovery has an enhanced scan engine to speed up the scanning process and reduce resource consumption. The optimized algorithm leads to a high recovery rate of around 95%.

Recovery Specific Data

The fast data recovery tool, iTop Data Recovery offers different scan options for different needs. Users can quickly find their lost data by Location and File Type. During the scanning, iTop Data Recovery can fix known bugs. After scanning, users can select specific data to recover if they don’t want to recover them all.

One-stop Solution for Any Data Loss

iTop Data Recovery can be used to retrieve data for 1000+ formats of lost documents, photos, videos, and audio from most external devices such as hard drives, SSD, external disks, USB drives, etc. It supports 30+ multi-languages. It even allows users to recover files after a factory reset.

How to Use iTop Data Recovery to Recover a Formatted SD Card

Step 1. Download and install iTop Data Recovery on PC.


Free Download

For Windows 11/10/8/7

Step 2. Select scan location/file type and start scan.

Connect the formatted SD card to computer and launch iTop Data Recovery.

Select the SD card location as scan object from the list or manually choose the location by clicking Select Folder.

By default, iTop Data Recovery selects all supported file types. But if you just want to recover files in specific type(s), check it or them.

After that, click Scan button to start scanning the SD card.

Select Scan Location to Recover a Formatted SD Card

Step 3. Recover data from the formatted SD card.

After the formatted data is shown, select certain or all files according to your needs and then hit on Recover button. Soon, it gives a message saying that files have been recovered. You can click OK to view the formatted data from the destination folder.

Recover Files from Formatted SD Card

Thanks to modern data recovery software solutions, recovering data from formatted SD cards at home is no longer a dream. Everybody can recover a formatted SD card with the above methods. iTop Data Recovery offers an easy, fast, and 100% working way for formatted SD card recovery. Accidentally formatted SD cards will be not an issue anymore as iTop Data Recovery can recover a formatted SD card within a few clicks. Download iTop Data Recovery right away and become a data recovery master!

- iTop Data Recovery - Perform Expert Data Recovery
Lost your data? Here is how you can recover it, the right and easy way! 100% working.
For Windows 11/10/8/7
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