The draw of free and open-source software is always strong and while TestDisk and PhotoRec deliver, neither tool seems good enough to fully recover data from the source disk. Useful for low-level ...

Step 2: Select a recovery suite. The software mentioned in this tutorial is Recuva for Windows and PhotoRec for Mac, which are both free options.

PhotoRec scans the entire disk looking for known file headers. It uses these to find the lost image data. The 1GB card took approximately 15 minutes to scan and recovered all photos.