SD cards a handy storage medium for photos, videos and documents. Typically used to store files in digital cameras, camcorders and mobile phones, SD cards are pretty fragile and don’t like mistreatment, especially if they’re cheap - which can make for challenging data recovery.

Thankfully, SD card data recovery can be done for free at home, providing there isn’t a huge amount of physical damage to the NAND flash chip where your data is stored. The first thing you should do is make sure that you don’t format your SD card or MicroSD card; this can make data recovery more difficult. Next, try using a different card reader, and/or machine. It might sound strange, but a lot of SD card faults are actually down to hardware that reads the card rather than the card itself. Replacement SD card readers that use a USB interface can be purchased very cheaply online. You should also check to see if the write-protected switch is turned on; this switch is located on the side of the SD card and can easily become activated by mistake.

There are a number pieces of free data recovery software that you can use to recover data from a broken or corrupt SD card, some designed specifically for SD cards, but some generic ones that can be used with any storage device. We’ve discussed the best free data recovery software in a previous article, where we highlighted Recuva and EaseUS as particularly powerful programs, and both can be used to undertake SD card data recovery at home. If you’ve accidentally deleted a file on your SD or MicroSD card, and not formatted or overwritten it with new data, there’s a good chance Recuva - a powerful piece of data recovery software - will be able to get it back. Recuva takes advantage of the fact that when you delete a file, it is actually still present on the hard disk drive, solid state drive, USB flash drive or SD/MicroSD card until new data is written where it was previously stored. Additionally, Recuva has filters which can be applied, so you can recover certain types of files only, like JPEGs.

There are also pieces of data recovery software that is specifically catered to SD cards, and CardRecovery is one such program. CardRecovery is designed to recover photos from SD and MicroSD cards, and supports most common image and video file types, and is able to recover photos lost due to accidental deletion as well as partitioned cards. Your data is guaranteed to be protected thanks to CardRecovery performing read-only operations on your SD card, so there’s no danger of further damage or overwriting.