If you have one backup, you have no backup. That's a hard lesson to learn, but if you care about those photos it's possible to recover them if you haven't written stuff on that sdcard yet.

Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

Unless you’ve used something secure for formatting or wrote data to the SD after, consider attempting data recovery.

I'm just impressed an SD card in a Pi lasted since 2017 without losing all your data on its own.

For the future the general guideline is 3 copies of your data at minimum, so definitely set up some backups.

If you haven't done much writing to the SD card, you may be able to recover the data. Data isn't really "deleted", it is just labeled as deleted. There is software that can comb through the raw data and try to make sense of what files were there. I don't know of any specific software, so if anyone knows, please reply

Edit: Another commenter mentioned some success with DMDE

Edit 2: Worth mentioning that this is true of formats. As long as it doesn't zero out the entire media, it just edits the file system metadata to say there are no files.

There's an old saying, "Unix is user friendly, it's just fussy about it's friends."

Everyone else is gonna be like "if you don't have at least 3 backups of something blahblah" but you know, not everyone has the finances for that, so advice from a cheapskate computer nerd: when going through critical transfers/reformats/deletions like you were doing, ALWAYS try actually recovering stuff from the backup before you cross the point of no return. E.g. if the backup is a .zip, extract a few individual files from it and open them in their respective programs.

Testdisk and photorec, use them, they even saved my data from bricked Chinese usb flash drive, so it'll save yours unless you wrote dd if /dev/zero of /*/microsd. Also here's the tip, don't attempt to rebuild partition firstly, first step try to copy all files from microsd to another device with these programs and after that try other ways, edit: I've seen from your other comments that your data already was overwritten, my condolences

Condolences

I know I'm going to get down voted for this but this would be almost impossible to fuck up with a gui. Yet people insist that writing commands manually is superior. I'm sorry for your loss.

Sorry to hear, I feel you:

I wanted to delete all .m3u-files in my music collection when I learned:

find ./ -name "*.m3u" -delete -> this would have been the right way, all .m3u in the current folder would have been deleted.

find ./ -delete -name "*.m3u" -> WRONG, this just deletes the current folder and everything in it.

Who would have known, that the position of -delete actually matters.

Unlesa you did a full zeroing format the info might still be available. There was an applicarion that attempts to rebuild the partition / Filesystem from left over meta data or inode info. I forget the name unfortunately. Normall the strings command will get your photos but probably not if they were in a docker image database.

The bells of the Gion monastery in India echo with the warning that all things are impermanent.

My condolences :'(

I once lost a bunch of data because I accidently left a / at the end of a path... rsync can be dangerous lol

Sorry to read that.

I've dded an external drive instead of an SD card once by mistake. I've never felt more stupid than that day.

I think everyone has done this. I know I have. I believe I used dmda to recover all my photos back. Unfortunately I lost all the metadata for about 3000 photos. It took years to manually retap and redate them all but at least I didn’t lose them forever

Oh man, even reading that hurt ':D I'm sorry for your loss.

You are probably out of luck. If you are lucky you can use gparted to recover deleted partitions