Desperate Help Needed with CFast Card

Hello,
I have encountered a genuinely bizarre and maddening issue with one of my CFast cards and I'm deeply hoping someone might have a suggestion on how to deal with it. I formatted and wiped the card in question and then filled it with two days worth of new footage. I know all of the footage recorded, because I reviewed it in camera each night, playing back clips multiple times. But when I went to actually transfer the footage to a separate drive today, the only footage on the card was the footage from before I formatted and wiped it. Not a trace of the new footage shot. It's like the card completely reverted to the previous formatting and erased everything new in the process. Has anyone experienced anything like this before, and does anyone know of how I can hopefully get the new footage back? Thanks so much!

What happens if you try to play it in the camera again?
Which reader do you use?

You could try apps to see what is really on the card by deep scanning like EaseUS, ParetoLogic, R-tools, Stellar, Wondershare and more, you can test them before buying.

Also depending on how important the material is you can use services, they do cost a bit so you need to decide if it is worth it but they are more reliable than using apps your self.

aeroquartet.com fore corrupted video files including BRAW.

TDRC https://www.thedatarescuecenter.com/

Don’t get this the wrong way so could this be an operator error? I’ve never heard of such bizarre situation especially after the OP had reviewed the content on the CFast card nightly, as he stated. Not saying that couldn’t happen and if it did, the OP was viewing a payback while nothing is being transferred, hence the old footage was still there. But then again, OP said he formatted the card. Hmmm….

It’s a good reminder to backup your footage to multiple media, like right out of the camera, copy or backup everything in the card to at least two SSD or even HDD (if cost is not permissible) and make it a habit.

I once got a card in to my hands that had similar problem.
I could see most of the files but few shots were missing, I could not see those shots on the card.
The cameraman stood firm on those shots were made so I deep scanned the card a using one of those apps above and saw those files that he was 100% on that were taken and I backed up all media into my computer using the app.
The media were BRAW files and those who were not seen on the card prior ended up being corrupted because of card failure.
I uploaded those corrupted files to aeroquartet.com
They sent me back a demo of all those files after analyse and from there you can choose shots you really need and skip those you do not need.
You pay per file If I recall correctly.
I hope this helps

What happens if you try to play it in the camera again?
Which reader do you use?

Thanks for asking, I should've mentioned it in my post, but the first thing I tried to do was check the footage and play it on the camera, and it was the same result. All new footage missing.

The reader I use is a SanDisk Extreme PRO CFast 2.0 Reader.

Hi Johannes, thanks so much for your suggestions. Since I made the original post, I've attempted to use two different recovery apps, Diskdrill and Wondershare Recoverit. I didn't have much luck with Diskdrill, but Recoverit at least revealed some more confounding results that have me convinced the card is hopelessly and most likely irrevocably corrupted. I'm attaching a screen grab of one of those results. Where my card reader is only showing the 3 files that were on the disk before I formatted it and shot the new footage, Recoverit is showing 68 BRAW files, which I imagine is around the amount of missing footage. The problem though, is that all of the files share the same file number and handle as those 3 files from before the formatting, and they even have the same modified date as those 3 files (3/18/24 as opposed to 8/30 & 8/31 when the new footage was shot). Based on this, it seems to be a strange hierarchical glitch, where it's duplicated the name of those 3 files and therefore is only recognizing those 3 files, and I'm guessing it's overwritten all of the new footage with them (those 3 files were huge, so it would be physically impossible for all of the new footage and the old footage to exist on the card). Due to this, even if the new footage still exists on the card, I'm extremely hesitant to run the actual recovery from the app because I feel like it'll almost certainly eradicate any of the new footage by deleting any repeat file names.

I will absolutely contact aeroquartet though and see if they might be able to sort it out and recover the footage, but like I said earlier, I'm not too hopeful that it's possible. Regardless, thank you so much again for your suggestions!

Its painful going trough something like this.
What I would do is backing up those files, if I recall correctly it will backup those files using individual naming even thought they have the same name on the card its self and there will not be any thing done to those files that are on the card its self.
But seek advice Aeroquartet is a smart step I think.
I am pretty sure you already know but to be sure, don´t write anything on that card till its sorted out.
I hope you get those files back.
One question thought, could it be that this card is possible Lexar Professional 3500x?

Two companies I know of that help recover corrupted files from bad cards:

https://main.grauonline.de/video-repair ... s-experts/

https://aeroquartet.com/treasured/index.en.html

I believe Grauonline is software you buy, and Aeroquartet/Treasured is a service (and not a cheap one).

Certainly the pro service is the way to go here.
One thing you can do safely though: use a disk imaging program to byte for byte back up the card to an image file. Then you can play with that read-only image file and let recovery programs try to extract files from it.

Once it’s separate from the card you can’t hurt anything.

One question: is the card formatted FAT32 or HFS+? Always much safer to use the latter. FAT32 is a relatively brittle filesystem.