I love photorec and dd rescue. I have recovered many many disks and memory cards with it.

I even recovered a card that had been off to professional recovery and deemed unrecoverable. I think half the memory chips in the card were fried so I used DD rescue to recover what data I could and then photorec to sift the wreckage. The owner was delighted to receive some of the photos.

If you ever have to do this, use DD rescue to image the source media as a first step. Sometimes you don't get a second read!

You say it. A few years ago my homeserver behalved odd and i needed reboots. I took out the SSD, used dd-rescue and after that The SSD did not even show up as storage any more. Yhea. I also have backups since then. :)