Dp 008 sd card accidentally reformatted

[alexander tokeleaf]

Is there any way to try to recover this data? I just lost about 2 years worth of songs with a stupid mistake. Help!!

 

[dctdct]

Not trying to sprinkle salt on this wound, but: Did you never export your tracks or backup whole songs to a computer during this time?

 

[alexander tokeleaf]

I’m not liking the sound of that.. unfortunately I only exported a few songs that I deemed completed. Everything else were works in progress. I realize that was another mistake. Ironically I was trying to reformat the fat but mistakenly pressed reformat which is conveniently directly above it in the menu

 

[Arjan P]

OK, so how and where did you format? If it was in Windows and you did a Quick Format, chances are that all your data is still on it! Because quick format simply deletes the references to your files but not the files themselves. (BTW, also a full format leaves traces of the original ones and zeroes, but that probably requires a specialist to get the files back).

I have in the past successfully retrieved data from a disk (either SD or different) by looking around for software that does it, with Google. This becomes shady quite quickly, with results that possibly include stuff you don't want on your computer.. Search for "SD Card Data Recovery". BTW, I just did and Easeus came up, I think I used that.

 

[alexander tokeleaf]

I reformatted the card on the unit. Yesterday I downloaded recuva and scanned the sd card on my pc. There is definitely still stuff on the card, oddly enough some tracks that I had imported back on to the machine which were now “wave sound” files and not wav files. But I just don’t know where to look for the proprietary files that it saves the music tracks as before they’re converted to wavs. Does anyone know what that file extension is?

 

[Arjan P]

I don't know the file extensions, but can't you tell the recovery software to show you everything? TBH, it's been too long since I looked into this. And, the term 'wave sound file' is just a more understandable term for most people to say .wav files. I'm sure they mean the same.

 

[alexander tokeleaf]

Yes I did have it search for everything, I’m just not the most tech savvy person. There were maybe 30 folders that appeared so I guess I’ll just start going through them one at a time and see what I come up with.

 

[alexander tokeleaf]

I also wrote down the wrong model number, it’s a dp-03sd, not that it matters I don’t think, pretty sure it’s the same OS

 

[Phil Tipping]

These earlier machines store raw recordings in a proprietary format in the MTR partitions; these are unreadable by normal computer software. The later DP24/32 models use standard wave files in a FAT partition so are easier to recover.
This problem has cropped up before on the forum and as far as I'm unaware, there are no public-domain utilities to read or recover MTR data. Try writing to Tascam; even if they are unwilling to divulge the spec, they may be able to offer some support.
Update: As to why you can still 'see' some of the old wave files, they are presumably in the FAT partition, which only exists for transferring files to and from a computer (FAT or FAT32 is visible by most computers). As Arjan said, file contents still remain on a FAT partition even if they are 'deleted', as it's only the entry in the index/catalogue which is removed. That's how recovery utilities can find deleted files... but this only works if the utility understands the underlying format.