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Best free SD Card Recovery Software for Windows - 2023
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The spread of SD Cards and USB sticks brought along the problem of accidental data loss on portable devices. We can list a whole bunch of tools designed to help you out in problematic situations. Many of them you have to pay for, but there are some free ones as well. We are looking at the sd recovery software whose free versions are efficient indeed.
In this review we are going to tell you if there are any limits on the size of files or the features of the program in general, as well as talking about key features and strong points of each of those recovery apps.
Table of Contents
What criteria we used to evaluate the apps
Let's list the factors that influence the app's final score and our rating:
Price. The cost of data recovery is perhaps the main criterion that the user of the application is focused on. It is necessary that the cost corresponds to the quality of recovery and the actual amount of data that the user will be able to recover successfully.
Performance - it is necessary that the application works stably and the scanning / recovery speed is acceptable to the user.
Interface - it is very important that the application's interface is user-friendly and understandable for the end user.
Supported media types - the recovery app should support the specified media types.
Extras - additional features of the app that can improve the chances of data recovery.
Recuva
App rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱 4.1 out of 5
Best free choice for Windows users
The app can be installed on a Windows 11, 10, 8 and so on; there are both 32 and 64 bit versions of the tool. For the autonomous installation you can use the Portable version (don’t copy it to the memory card!).
UI and usability
The application interface is very simple and easy to understand. Users with little experience can use the step-by-step recovery by Recuva Wizard.
The second option is to skip the Recovery Wizard and go to the main Recuva window.
On the left side of the application there is a menu for selecting disks for recovery. It is enough to select any of the disks and click the Scan button.
To restore the content of the SD Card, define the type(s) of the deleted files, start the scan and have a look at the preview. Afterwards save the result to any device.
Performance
Recuva works quickly and without delays. Standard scanning time is 3 to 5 minutes for a 50 GB disk. If you select Deep scan mode, the scan time will increase by 3-4 times.
Supported media types
Recuva supports all types of removable media, including SD cards and USB flash drives. The main requirement is that the sd card must be formatted in the required file format and detected by Windows as a separate disk that can be scanned.
Alternatively, the user can create a virtual image of a sd card to connect it as a partition on your disk and then restore memory card from the copy
Extras
Deep Scan option is great when you need to rescue damaged files and partially erased data as well as to find the data which had been overlooked by other recovery tools.
Price / Quality
Recuva isn’t just a general program supporting data recovery from SD Cards, it’s also 100% free. If you want to compare it to other software, Recuva’s features are similar to those of its paid analogues such as Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro.
The price of Recuva Pro is $19.95. Recuva Free doesn’t include user support. Nevertheless, it provides detailed instructions, and you can get prompt answers to your questions on the forum.
- Clear interface which suitable both for experienced users (Advanced mode) and newbies (Recuva Wizard)
- No limitations on the amount of recoverable data in the Free version
- Color marking depending on how damaged your deleted files are
- Few limitations, Deep Scan mode
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard
App rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱 4.2 out of 5
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is quite a celebrity on the market of free memory card data recovery software for mobile and desktop devices. Compatible with Windows 7,10, Server and others versions of the OS.
Recovery cases include damaged SD Cards, formatted RAW (what is it?) and those having reading errors as well as SSD/HDD with bad blocks. It’s easy to create a VHD image of the disk and restore from it without the risk of overwriting the files.
The program is easy to use and is similar to the Explorer. In the settings specify a memory device/storage media and preferred file type, and this can be both file extensions selected by you and all the found data.
The developer confirms in the comparative table on its website that EaseUS Data Recovery Free can save up to 2GB of data, which is more than enough for a photo archive or a short video/clip.
If you feel restrained by the limitations and features of the Free version, there is always an option to buy the full version of it – Data Recovery Wizard Pro (priced at ($69.95). Fully-functional for 30 days.
Strong points of EaseUS Data Recovery:
- 2GB of data restored for free,
- Flexibility: besides memory cards it supports SSD/HDD/USB flash drives,
- Creation of an ISO image for an SD Card.
Disk Drill
App rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱 4 out of 5
It is suitable for memory cards in photo cameras and phones in mass storage mode. It supports data recovery on MMC, SDHC/X, MicroSD, CF, XD and Sony Memory Sticks.
In HFS+, FAT or NTFS file systems Quick Scan is applicable while raw and unknown filesystems can only be scanned in the Deep Scan mode, which involves search by signatures in file system tables.
Free (Personal) version is limited by the max of 500MB that you can restore. If you excess the limitation, you can but the Pro version for $89.
Disk Drill Free includes a number of add-ons such as backup and preview before saving selected files.
Strong points of Disk Drill:
- Shows disks with unallocated space in the device list
- Handy filtering of recovered files by file type and other attributes
- An option to pause a recovery session
- Scanning SD Card for data by signatures (Deep Scan)
7-Data Recovery
App rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱 3.5 out of 5
7-Data Recovery can retrieve less deleted files from sd card for you than, say, EaseUS Data Recovery – up to 1GB. However, this can be quite enough not only to test the tool but get the needed files recovered.
Platforms: Windows
Price: Free
Limitations: Up to 1GB
Using 7-Data Recovery makes sense if you had lost files on SD Card of a digital camera or smartphone (mostly because if reading errors or formatting). Yet it can be any device recognized by Windows as NTFS or FAT file system.
The results are displayed as a Directory tree; you can see Name, Size, File type and Modification date of selected files. There is also a preview option that can be enabled.
The settings are not complicated. You can enable scanning for RAW files and define file types you want to scan for (Graphics/Documents/Multimedia, etc.).
On top of the basic tool the developer offers 7-Data Card Recovery on its page. This one supports all the essential types of memory cards, including Memory Stick, microSD, Compact Flash and others.
Strong points of 7-Data Recovery:
- Wide coverage of numerous memory card and USB flash drive types
- Simple User Interface
- Handy-to-set up scan and filter of results
Photorec
App rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱 4.8 out of 5
This program is designed for working with erased images and photo. The developers claim that several hundred other formats are also supported (by the way, you can also create your own search patterns)
Platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS
Price: Free
Limitations: no
It's almost impossible to find a review on free recovery tools without Photorec being mentioned in it.
The biggest advantage is that the file system you store the lost files in isn't crucial for the program: it can be FAT, NTFS (Windows), HFS (Mac OS) or exFAT, ext2/ext3/ext4 (Linux). Photorec can search by specific labels, i.e. signatures which allows it to find file fragments, corrupted data and whole files (if possible).
Photorec is a safe memory card recovery software for pc which works in read-only mode. The results can be copied into a folder on another disk, flash drive or mobile device memory card. It also should be mentioned that the program doesn't limit the amount of recovery results any user can save.
The list of storage devices you can recover from is quite large: CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital/SD and other memory types, not to mention HDD/SSD. You can also recover deleted files from media players memory, digital and video cameras.
On the forum forum.cgsecurity.org you can read different recovery cases or ask the developer your questions. In fact there is a free technical support.
DMDE
App rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱 4 out of 5
DMDE provides professional recovery from memory cards, flash drives and HDD.
Even though the free version is limited, we decided to include this program in the review. The program is cross-platform which means that it can be used under Windows, Linux, Mac OS and DOS via the command line.
Let's start with its limitations. DMDE free version allows you to recover up to 4000 items.
Other versions of DMDE program (Express, Standard and Professional) remove the file limits. License cost starts from €16.
Moreover, basic tools are available in the free edition:
- Disk editor allows you to manually change disk structures and file tables as well as perform a deep search for deleted files
- and create image discs for future recovery from a complete copy of the original.
The list of compatible storage devices includes HDD, RAID arrays, usb flash drives, sd and microsd cards. The file system can be almost any one from the existing. When we are talking about memory cards it usually comes to NTFS, exFat or FAT. Linux and Mac OS FS are also supported.
Glary Undelete
App rating: 🐱🐱🐱 3.4 out of 5
Glary Undelete (also known as File Undelete) is a little free tool which does data recovery on SD Cards. It only works with the file systems FAT and NTFS, so if your USB flash drive or SD Card uses one of these, Glary Undelete cab be of help.
Inside Glary Undelete basic recovery features are easy to see. Still the paid version of the program provides a few pleasant additions, deep scan in particular. This is the key feature, whereas so often such utilities are simply useless without it.
The program offers filtering by name of the file, size, date and status. It comes in super handy when you need to sort all those tons of files the tool is going to find for you. Filtering enables you to save only selected data.
State of the file can be marked either as “Very Good” or “Poor”, marking like in Recuva tool.
Strong points of Glary Undelete:
- Unlimited recovery on SD Card
- Filtering and preview of scan results
- Marking the status of the data being restored
Which program is the best choice?
Recuva is a free sd card data recovery software which operates fully without any payment (We hope, it will stay like this forever). This is the exact reason why this program stays the most popular on the market.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard free version limits allow just 2 GB of data to be recovered which is quite enough to begin with. This program is very user-friendly and it has a step by step wizard.
7-Data Recovery and DiskDrill are now one and the same software. It has some nice additions, for example you can pause the scanning process or search by signatures.
Glary Undelete is a pretty simple sd card recovery software for PC. It's quite suitable for recovering files on a memory card, but it hangs behind all the other programs if we compare their functionality.
DMDE is probably the best professional tool and its price is low if we take into account its list of capabilities. It properly searches for files on a memory card, although mostly it's used for recovering data on a hard drive.
Photorec is mostly suitable for searching for lost photos and recovering them on any desktop platform. Memory cards are supported as claimed and you can work with them via a card reader.
Bottom Line
Well, obviously there are many more free sd card data recovery software, but while doing my research I found out that many of them stopped being developed.
It is also an often case when the software description claims it to be free, while what they do is they offer you to buy the program once you’ve previewed the results and pressed “Recover”.
Besides, by a free version they can possibly mean a demo with limited features.
Leave your comments whether any of the reviewed software has been of help and suggest other tools you used to our readers. Thanks!
Vlad Brown, USA, Buffalo, WY
Vlad is a professional writer. He has expert knowledge in data recovery with 15 years of experience. He started his career as a journalist by reviewing PC and mobile apps. His current responsibilities are to keep track of users' questions and answer them.
His current responsibilities are to keep track of users' questions and provide answers to them, write proven manuals, be the website technical support and also run a Youtube channel.