My SD card (and entire phone) was reformatted - are images gone forever?

[Android Central Question]

I woke up this morning & my phone was shut off, which was unusual. Upon turning it on, I had to go through an entirely new setup, as if it were a brand new phone. I used a restore point available from 3 days ago, so most of my apps were downloaded automatically, but my microsd card is reading as empty. I wasn't thinking very clearly and just tapped through the setup, very confused as to what was going on.

I didn't do anything to cause this hard reset. I've been using the same microsd for the past 18 months, first on an S8 and now this S9; are all the photos & video I had on there permanently gone? I didn't have cloud backup enabled for media.

 

[Rukbat]

Before you do anything else, remove the SD card from the phone.

Now, download PhotoRec to your PC (there are Windows, Linux and Mac versions). Instructions are at PhotoRec Step By Step. "Formatting" an SD card usually does a quick format and, since PhotoRec doesn't look at the "disk" structure, and quick formatting only changes the directory entries and the allocation table, not the files themselves, it doesn't care. If the files are still on the card somewhere, PhotoRec will recoer them. The only problem is that the file names are kept in the directory, and that's gone. You will get the file types, so a picture will still be recovered as a .jpg file, or whatever it was, but with a File0001.jpg type of name. So you can still open it, look at it and rename it. (Or use an EXIF editor to see what the name was. There are even programs that will run on a folder full of picture files, renaming them all to the names in their EXIF data.)

Be prepared for a long recovery. SD cards are slow, and the program is thorough. Sitting and watching it is like watching grass grow on the North Slope of Alaska in the winter. (And you have to have enough hard drive space for all the files on the SD card - it doesn't write to the card, it saves restored files to another storage medium, like a hard drive.)

Unfortunately, there's no version for Android, or you could recover most of the files on the phone too. (Setting it up probably wiped a few of them.)

If you're familiar with Linux, and know Android fairly well, see Recover data from an iPhone and adapt. (You can find the partition for userdata or /sdcard/0/ by using 'by-name'.) If you're not familiar with Linux, ignore this paragraph.