Recovery of deleted files

Photorec

 

None of the free ones work well. Particularly if your hard drive is S.M.A.R.T. enabled - your system will fully wipe the data pretty quickly. If it's an SSD drive, there's basically nothing you can do. The data is fully wiped immediately. If it's a S.M.A.R.T. enabled HDD, you have a small window of time before the process runs - disconnect your hard drive as soon as possible so the S.M.A.R.T. process can't run on it, then reconnect once you're ready to recover. The only thing that I've found to work reliably is a software called R-Studio (not to be confused with the RStudio data analysis software that researchers use). Here's the website: https://www.r-studio.com/ - you can find pirated versions of their R-Studio technician package if you can't afford it. If the HDD is NOT S.M.A.R.T. enabled, then you have all the time in the world, just don't write anything to that HDD drive until you've done your recovery.

Edit to add, if it's an SD card, then your options can be pretty good, and many free ones will work. I've used Recuva before (free in the Microsoft store, not sure about Mac) with some success on SD cards. Now, I use ProGrade's Recovery Pro software because I use their cards and got access for free, but you can purchase it, too: https://shop.progradedigital.com/products/recovery-pro-data-recovery-software