[SOLVED] Recovered 22GB Photos from 8GB Sandisk

[Wheelie]

Can anyone explain how I recovered 22GB of data off an 8GB flash disk?

8GB SanDisk SDHC I (also has a letter "C" with a 6 in it)

A good customer calls the other day: "I just got back from a trip and was going over my photos and I accidentally deleted all my photos from my camera! Can you get them back?" I asked her not to turn the camera on again and to remove the flash drive and drop it off so I can attempt the data recovery.

So I take a look at it and sure enough the flash drive is empty (3 empty root folders). So I run a Deep Scan with EaseUS Data Recovery and it shows 22GB of data is recoverable and I'm thinking "that's weird" so I click "Recover" to save it to one of my raid banks and walk away. When it gets done - sure enough - there's 22GB of photos and they are all good except a couple! I say they are "good" but I only looked at the thumbnails and then opened each folder and browsed through all the photos very quickly using Windows 7 Photo Viewer. I also ran a duplicate file check using CCleaner for files size, name, date, and there are no dupes.

Explorer shows the format of the flash disk is FAT32 and has 7.39GB total space. Disk Management shows the same.

Now I am not the fastest knife in the drawer ... but can anyone explain how I recovered 22GB of data off an 8GB flash disk?

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Most likely some of the files had been deleted, but still able to be recovered. Kinda common to recover more than you expect in that situation.

 

[Markverhyden]

If it's a fishing expedition - http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

 

[Easy PC]

I would agree with this....its recovered from previous deleted material.

Most likely some of the files had been deleted, but still able to be recovered. Kinda common to recover more than you expect in that situation.

 

[freedomit]

I would agree with this....its recovered from previous deleted material.

I disagree with this, surely regardless of previous data there is physically only 8GB worth of 1's and 0's so how can there be 22GB of data that is fully readable? If they were fragments then maybe but the OP said they were full files?

 

[labtech]

Quite often a file or more may be corrupt in the sense of a corrupt file size attribute. Likely have a couple of files that are bigger than they should be.

 

[Wheelie]

I posed my above question to SanDisk Tech Support:

I have an 8GB SanDisk SDHC I (also has a letter "C" with a 6 in it). Accidentally deleted all the photos so I scanned it with EaseUS Data Recovery program and I recovered 22GB of photos! QUESTION: How was it possible to recover 22GB of photos from an 8GB SanDisk SDHC Flash Memory Card?

And I received this response:
Thank you for contacting SanDisk® Global Customer Care. I would like to share this with you that technically, this is not possible to recover 22GB of data off an 8GB card however I would request you to contact EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional and check with them as we do not have expertise on this software and are unknown about how it works.
Best regards,
[name removed]
SanDisk® Global Customer Care

I guess there's a hidden location on flash drives like the hidden partition on hard drives. That's the only thing I can think of.

 

[Markverhyden]

On the 8gb original and recovering much more. Personally I have no experience with the Easus product. But with R-Studio part of the recovery options involves identifying different partitions. So it's easy to end up with much more than the original drive size if you recover all.

Did you try photorec?

 

[labtech]

I would recommend DMDE.

 

[Wheelie]

Quite often a file or more may be corrupt in the sense of a corrupt file size attribute. Likely have a couple of files that are bigger than they should be.

You are correct! I did not look for that before. A bunch of file sizes are around 48MB each and should really only be about 3MB or 4MB each.

On the 8gb original and recovering much more. Personally I have no experience with the Easus product. But with R-Studio part of the recovery options involves identifying different partitions. So it's easy to end up with much more than the original drive size if you recover all. Did you try photorec?

I did! Just downloaded and ran it a couple hours ago and to my complete suprise it recovered MORE FILES than EaseUS and they do not have the file size corruption problem! Thanks for the tip on that program!

Check out the results:

Thanks for your expert tips! Mystery Solved!

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