The longer explanations from the homepage: what probably happened to your card, what each scan does, how long it takes and which files come back.
When it happens
If the wedding photos disappeared from the card this morning, take it out of the camera and leave it out. Every new picture is saved into space that may still hold the old ones.
Most lost photos are still on the card until something is written over them. Here are the common situations, what has probably happened in each, and what to do now.
Getting it working
You choose the card and press Start Scan. There are no settings. Files appear in the list while the scan is still running.
The deep scan reads the whole card, so the time is roughly the card's size divided by the speed of your reader. Cards with damaged areas take longer, because failed reads are retried. These are rough figures, not promises.
| Card size | USB 3 reader or built-in slot about 90 MB/s | Older USB 2 reader about 35 MB/s |
|---|---|---|
| 32 GB | about 6 minutes | about 15 minutes |
| 64 GB | about 12 minutes | about 30 minutes |
| 128 GB | about 25 minutes | about 1 hour |
| 256 GB | about 50 minutes | about 2 hours |
Advanced searching techniques
Each scan reads the card twice, once through its file table and once block by block. A photo found both ways is listed once.
AMWT
FF D8 FF for a JPEG, an ftyp box for HEIC, CR3, MP4 and MOV, PK for Word, Excel and ZIP files, %PDF for a PDF, fLaC for FLAC audio, and so on for more than 60 formats. It works on any file system, and after a format.The deep scan follows these segments in order. A file that starts but never reaches a real end, or whose segments don't add up, is found partly or not at all.
File restoration
You pick a folder on your computer or another drive. The app won't save to the card it is recovering from, because that could overwrite files still waiting to be found.
AMWT Desktop does not repair or rebuild damaged files. If part of a file was overwritten, that part is gone for good, and you recover what is left.
Preview
Open any file the scan finds and look at it properly: full screen, with the camera, the date it was taken and its size. Step through with the arrow keys. Previews are made from the data on the card, so they show the file you will get back.
Safe and secure
How read-only scanning works · What leaves your computer · Privacy notice
Background
A little background on what happens inside a memory card when files are deleted, and why that decides what can be recovered.
A card keeps an index of what is where. Deleting a photo, or a quick format, only changes the index. The photo stays put until something new is saved into the same space, which is why the first rule is to stop using the card.
When macOS can't read a card, it offers to initialise it. That writes a brand-new, empty file system over the old one and can wipe the index that holds your file names. Click Ignore. The photos are usually fine underneath.
When a file is deleted on an SSD, the computer can tell the drive those blocks are free (a command called TRIM), and the drive may clear them soon after. That is why recovery from SSDs varies so much, and why files deleted from a Mac's internal SSD are so often gone for good.
A long clip is written in many pieces, and on a busy card those pieces don't always sit next to each other. Once the index is gone, the gaps can't always be bridged, so some clips play part of the way. Photos, which are smaller, rarely have this problem.
File names and folders live only in the index. A format replaces it, so photos found afterwards are found by their contents and given new names. The pictures are the same; the labels are what's lost.
A drive that clicks, won't spin up or keeps disconnecting has a physical fault. Every attempt to read it can make it worse. Turn it off and take it to a data recovery lab; no app, including ours, is the right tool.
The scan shows you every photo and video it can get back, with full-size previews, before you decide anything. You only pay if you choose to recover them.
See everything it finds before you decide. macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon and Intel; Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit (early access).
