Which cards, file systems and file types are supported

Cards and drives

SD, microSD and CF cards, and USB drives. You can also open a disk image of a card.

File systems

FAT16, FAT32, exFAT	Full support. Deleted files come back with their names and folders, and the deep scan also runs. Almost every camera card uses one of these.
Anything else	Deep scan only, for the file types listed below. Names and folders are not recovered. This includes NTFS (Windows), Mac formats, ext4 and damaged cards.

File types

The quick scan (FAT16, FAT32, exFAT) recovers deleted files of any type, with their names. A file stored in several pieces may come back partly damaged, because the quick scan assumes its pieces sit next to each other.

The deep scan reads every block of the card and recognises these types by how they start. It works after a format and on any file system, but the files get new names, such as Recovered 00012.docx, in a folder called No original folder.

Photos	JPEG, PNG, HEIC and HEIF, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP, Photoshop PSD and PSB
Camera RAW	Canon CR2 and CR3, Nikon NEF and NRW, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF, Samsung SRW, DNG
Video	MP4, MOV, M4V, 3GP, AVCHD and MPEG-TS (.mts, .m2ts, .ts), MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, FLV, MPEG (.mpg, .vob)
Audio	MP3, MP2, AAC, M4A, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, WMA, MIDI
Documents	PDF; Word, Excel and PowerPoint (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx and the older .doc, .xls, .ppt); Visio; Publisher; Outlook .msg; OpenDocument (.odt, .ods, .odp, .odg); Pages, Numbers and Keynote; RTF; EPUB
Archives and data	ZIP (also .jar and .apk), 7-Zip, RAR, CAB, MSI, SQLite databases

The deep scan doesn't find plain text, CSV, HTML, gzip and tar files, Access databases or Outlook .pst files, because they have no fixed start to look for. Nor does it find older or less common RAW types (Canon CRW, Sigma X3F, Minolta MRW, Phase One IIQ), Insta360 .insv and .insp, BRAW, R3D, MXF, CAF or AMR. All of these come back by name through the quick scan while the file table still lists them.

How each file is checked

A file is marked Intact only after a real check. What the labels mean.

JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF and WebP are decoded by the app.
On a Mac, HEIC and camera RAW are decoded with macOS's own decoder. On Windows, HEIC has no preview and RAW previews use the JPEG stored inside the file, so both stay Not checked: see what's different on Windows.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx), OpenDocument, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, EPUB and ZIP files are unpacked, and every part's checksum is compared.
FLAC files are checked frame by frame, including the audio fingerprint stored in the file. Ogg and Opus files are checked page by page.
Everything else, including PDF, older Office files, RTF, 7-Zip, RAR, SQLite, MP3, WAV and video, gets a structure check. A file that fails it is marked Partly damaged; one that passes stays Not checked. Long video clips may come back partly damaged.

Not supported yet

Recovering names and folders from NTFS drives.
The computer's own internal drive (This Mac, or Local Disk C: on Windows).
A Linux version of the app. The Windows version is in early access: see install on Windows.
Cards and drives that are physically failing.

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