What is an SD card and What Does it Do?

What is a micro SD card and can you recover lost information from it?

What is an SD card? An SD card or a Security Digital card is one which is going to store additional amounts of information for you. It’s used for mobile devices such as cameras and smart phones, for instance and it’s capable of being a life saver in certain situations.

what is sd card

However, the type of SD cards that the majority of phones and other mobile solutions like tablets, for instance, are going to use the so called micro SD card. What is a micro SD card? You might ask. This is basically a slightly smaller SD card which is going to be about the size of your fingernail. However, unlike their appearance, these little helpers are capable of storing up to several gigabytes of information.

It’s hard to answer the question what is the best SD card because it would really depend on the type of solution you need. It’s quite obvious that going with a micro SD one would be necessary if your phone or other solution requires it but that’s not always the case.

The same goes for the size of the card. You wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hundred of bucks to get a 120 GB card when in reality you wouldn’t use more than, let’s say 10GB. With this in mind, you would also want to get an answer to the question what is a SD card used for.

The SD card is a basic way of transferring information and storing it. The good thing about it is that it’s a non-volatile solution just like the majority of storage devices and you don’t need power source for it to keep the data. Furthermore, it’s particularly portable and mobile and a regular micro SD card is going to be compatible with a wide range of mobile devices, provided they accept the implementation of a SD card.

what is sd

You’d be surprised to understand that a lot of manufacturers would allow customers to implement a micro SD or a regular SD card. The reason is pretty obvious – they want to force people into purchasing their highest paid product if they need more space.

How to use SD card?

To be completely honest, the usage of a SD card is pretty straightforward. In any case, all you need to do is pick out the SD slot from the device that you want to use it with, place the card within that slot and insert it back into the device. Usually the device is going to automatically pick up the signals and it’s going to deploy all the necessary information on its own so there’s really no need for you to do anything.

Unfortunately, sometimes SD cards get formatted unexpectedly and it’s in situations of the kind that you would need to make sure you can recover the lost information. There are different tools on the market that you could take a look at.

Disk Drill is one of these tools and its functioning so far seems to depict promising results.
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Steps to Recover Deleted Files from an SD Card:

  • Step 1: Download and install a data recovery software


    This is obviously the most basic thing that you would need to take care of upon deciding to recover your backup information. You can download the software from the company’s website. Furthermore, you would also have to install it, which is absolutely seamless.
  • Step 2: Connect an SD card to your PC


    The next thing that you would want to do is to connect the phone or the camera or basically any device which uses the SD card to your computer. This is going to let us see what’s wrong with the audience and basically everything there is to know about the company.
    SD card recover
  • Step 3: Perform the scanning


    Right after you manage to connect the SD card to your computer, you will need to perform the scan on it. Disk Drill keeps things particularly comprehensive and takes into considerations your preferences. With this in mind, you can choose between going for a Quick Scan or for a Deep Scan.

    Quick Scan is usable in situations in which you’ve lost a smaller amount of information and you’ve done so recently. Basically this tool is the less powerful one as it’s not going to perform a complete and thorough background check but it’s capable of revealing recent losses and recovering them effectively. That’s why it’s also a lot faster.
    SD card scan Deep Scan, on the other hand, is particularly useful if you need to recover larger amounts of data and you’ve lost them quite some time ago. This is a powerful scanning tool which is going to recover quite a few files.
    SD card recovery tool As you can see, the choice is completely situational and you need to decide for yourself which one would be the best at any given time.
  • Step 4: Recover Deleted Files


    This is the last and final step of the process. All you need to do is take a look at the lists of files which are going to be provided and recover those of them that you need.
    SD card recovery software Keep in mind that some files might actually be corrupted and they might have lost their integrity and eternal structure which is going to render them impossible to recover.

So basically that’s the process that you’d have to go through if you use the Disk Drill software. It goes without saying that it’s pretty seamless and easy to use. However, it might help if you have some basic ideas and knowledge on what is an SD card and the specifications around it. This way you can manage everything a bit better.

However, it’s also safe to say that the software doesn’t presume any technical knowledge so even if you have nothing to do with computers it’s easy to recover your information through it. Losing information could be detrimental in certain situations and it is software such as Disk Drill that could turn out to be life saving.

Arthur Cole

Arthur Cole is a freelance content creator. He also has a more than 10-year experience in program development for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android. Arthur Cole is a writer with deep expertise in programming, who can easily...

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Brett Johnson

This article has been approved by Brett Johnson, Data Recovery Engineer at ACE Data Recovery. Brett has a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Systems and Network, 12 years of experience.