Free SD card Recovery Tools for Mac (Command Line Tools Alert!)

Ok, long story short, I lost some photos from my china trips because of a sync issue of a china cloud company. Now, the only way I can recover my precious photos is through recovering them in the SD card that I used to take those photos. However, I have already formatted the card and taken some other photos into it. Thus, I need a SD card recovery tools to extract my photos. Fortunately, after some researches I found that there is a free one for Mac (PhotoRec), but it's a command line tool.

I am writing this post so that the future me can follow this step by step guide to recovery photos from SD card using Mac for free.

1. Download PhotoRec from its website download link

2. Unzip the software by $ bzip2 -dc [filename].tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -

3. Go into the unzipped folder and type  sudo ./photorec to run PhotoRec

4. Type your Mac account password

5. Select the "Disk /dev/rdiskX". You can tell your SD card by looking at the size, my SD card is "16 GB /14 GiB (RO)"

6. Then Choose "No partition ................ [Whole disk]" to make sure the whole SD card is being searched.

7. Select the filesystem of the SD card in which the photo is being stored, choose "[ Other  ] FAT/NTFS/...."

8. Choose the destination of the recovered file, follow the on screen instruction to proceed

9. PhotoRec should start recovering the file on your SD card (Stats will shown on the terminal screen)

10. Go to the destination folder to check the file being recovered.

11. You can remove the thumbnails by the command sudo rm -rf t*.jpg

12. You can change the ownership of the files by sudo chmod o+w *.jpg



Hope you can recover your precious moments following the steps above :)

Let me know if you run into any problem by leaving comment below



Reference: Restoring photos from SD with PhotoRec | Bus error: Jake Billo's weblog: