EOS Rebel T7i photos disappeared - not deleted not formatted

[leifsok]

Hello,

Canon EOS Rebel T7i

Lexar SD Card

I had over 100 photos existing on the SD Card. Camera was turned off. Turned on again. Two photos taken and when I reviewed the photos, all others were gone and only the two most recent photos were present on the SD Card. I have tried a number of different software packages to try to recover photos, but when they scan the SD Card, none have found deleted or corrupted files.

I'm not sure where all the photos went. The card wasn't formatted and the files were not manually deleted - so where did they go?

Appreciate the help of the community.

Kirk  

[Peter]

Don't write anything to the card because overwritten data will never come back.
Which recovery software have you tried?

[leifsok]

tried Recuva, easeUS, ZAR.

I have only run the scans - none of which detected any files other than the system hidden files and the two existing photos.

[ebiggs1]

Seeing the photo on the back LCD screen is not a confirmation they were saved to the SD card. Can you verify that the photos were actually on the SD card? I say this because if "Recuva, easeUS, ZAR" did not find anything I doubt anything is there to recover.

Try the SD in a computer or card reader.

[leifsok]

prior to turning the camera off there were over 100 photos that had been saved successfully. after the camera was off and then turned back on (about 15-30 minutes later) all those photos were gone and only two photos were visible on the LCD. I then put the SD card in a reader and could only see the two photos on the computer.

[kvbarkley]

Do you whatever software you are using on the computer set to delete images on import? (Which is a bad idea, in general, IMHO, just because of cases like this.)

[ebiggs1]

"I then put the SD card in a reader and could only see the two photos on the computer."

I fear they are truly gone and unrecoverable.  Either they were never saved to the SD card or they got deleted by hook or crook somehow.

[leifsok]

I think so too. So strange. I wonder if some partition / data table was overwritten but I can't see any recoverable partitions when I try a partition recovery tool.

Thanks for the responses.

[Waddizzle]

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@leifsok wrote:

I think so too. So strange. I wonder if some partition / data table was overwritten but I can't see any recoverable partitions when I try a partition recovery tool.

Thanks for the responses.

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Did you format the memory card in the camera prior to first use?  

[Peter]

With older camera models, like 7D, Canon caches the images (5-10). If this is true also for your T7i it means there is a chance you only reviewed the cached images and not on the memory card saved images. But if you have 100 images and still was able to see more than the last 10 taken images they must have been saved to the memory card.

As ebiggs1 wrote the chance to recover is low if you failed with Recuva etc. I use Photorec and its whole disk search feature, but I don't see how it would help you here.