EOS M50 Can't recover deleted photos

[cameraeosm50]

i'm so pissed off. i just wrote a whole paragraph explaining my situation and it got erased once i tried to post it. it's gone now. anyway, in short

- i have a canon camera eos m50

- i accidentally erased all my photos in march and took more afterwards

- articles said i needed a USB cable

- i couldn't find my camera on any recovery softwares

- it's december and i've taken a million photos since then

will anything help me?

[Waddizzle]

If you have continued to use the memory card since you deleted the photos, then they are lost.

[rs-eos]

As mentioned by Wadizzle, your photos are not recoverable.   If you accidentally deleted them then immediately tried to recover them, you'd have more success.  Though if erasing/deleting involved a low-level format of the memory card, that may no longer be possible to recover either.

Do though take some steps to safeguard your photos in the future.   Sync your photos to your computer often.   I will import photos immediately after any event.

If you hardly take any photos during the year, set up a schedule to at least import once per month.   Though you have to answer the following question: "Are you willing to lose up to a month's worth of photos?"  If the answer is no, then schedule imports more often.

Just copying images to your computer is not enough.  Create backups of those photos along with all your other import data.   Preferably also have an offsite backup.

For my most crucial photos (those that cannot be re-created), I have five copies of each photo.  Where two of those copies are in separate offsite locations.   Less crucial photos still have three copies; one copy being offsite.

[andre-7d]

For my most crucial photos (those that cannot be re-created), I have five copies of each photo.  Where two of those copies are in separate offsite locations.   Less crucial photos still have three copies; one copy being offsite.

---

Those who shoot a lot will have a few TBs worth of original images/videos. Keeping 3 copies of that will be tricky to maintain without some automation. If a lot of images are edited, edits need to be propagated to all copies as well in some automated way or it will be hard to tell what was edited and when.

For hardware failures, I would suggest using low-level drive replication, such as Storage Spaces in Windows or LVM on Linux. This will protect data if a single drive goes bad. I would also advise against hardware RAID - when a board dies in these devices, the whole thing is gone and most manufacturers will just shrug it off.

Beyond that, it really depends on amount of data and usage patterns.

[andre-7d]

If you erased images on a memory card, as opposed to an SSD drive, you may still be able to recover some, even after a while. Use recovery software such as Recuva, RStudio, Active Undelete, etc. Set them to low-level scan and make sure Canon raw files are selected (e.g. .CR2).

[shadowsports]

Greetings,

This might be true, if the media does not continue to be used.  Deleting a file doesn't actually remove it.  It only marks the first bit where the file is stored as "available" for the OS (camera) in this case to use for storing more images.  Once you start overwriting this space marked as "free" the chances of recovery become almost non-existent.  The time and more writes which occur subsequently pretty much diminish any hope of rebuilding the blocks of data comprising a file.  One overwite is bad, but once it becomes more that, chance for recovery is less than 1% unfortunately.  

[andre-7d]

Unlike SSDs, memory cards don't use TRIM, so data remains there until overwritten and many of them try to use new areas for writing to reduce wear because memory in those cards can be written to only so many times. What you are saying is true, but depending on usage pattern, some files may still be recoverable. I was able to restore a few files after a few months of using one of the cards, for example. Worth a try.

[shadowsports]

@cameraeosm50,

We're sorry about your photos.  Maybe this can help with posting on the forum.  During composition, your unpublished replies are automatically saved every few minutes.  You don't need to do anything.

If you forget to post or if your browser is closed by mistake, you can return to the thread or reply and resume loading a unpublished reply or edit.

Click in the reply box

Then click "Load" to re-populate your unpublished content. Note "Load" appears faint against the black background.