Using a V3 Cam, had a micro sd card in there, went to pull data and it wouldn’t respond in the app.
Put the card into a pc - and got this error:
‘the volume does not contain a recognized file system’…
I was then prompted to format the disk - I did not.
Question:
Is it possible to recover what is on there? If I take it to a data specialist?
Anyone have a similar issue?
The SD card is toast.
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the degree of corruption. Even if you recover, there’s a big chance of losing something. FAT/FAT32/exFAT formats aren’t journaled formats, so hard to say.
There certainly are outfits that will do this. I haven’t seen one that will guarantee results. The decision depends on how valuable its data is.
That’s what I was thinking, too, and I wouldn’t expect that kind of recovery (if possible) to be inexpensive.
Welcome to the Forum, @brian.wick! 
My wife’s phone suddenly died and she hadn’t backed up the phone and lost all her pictures that she’d taken. Called few of those data recovery places, they all wanted between $300-500 dollars just to assess if the pictures were recoverable without any guarantee. On top of that initial fee they were going to charge whatever it took to recover the data and again with no guarantee. Those places are geared towards corporations who have more money than brains.
I’ve recovered files off SD cards using the free version of Easeus. Actually I don’t think it was technically the free version, I think I had found a trick to remove the limits (or rather, reset them when needed) of the free version. I’ve also used paid tools to recover entire hard drives (or at least most of them). There are other good ones out there too besides Easeus but it is a pretty simple one to use. Most likely some files will be corrupted but often the card goes into “read only” mode very quickly after issues start to try and protect your data. I think the last one I did, out of 100 images only a few were corrupted. Granted the video files are bigger than images, but not by a ton, and there is a new file every minute which helps make things more recoverable.
The nice thing about most of the data recovery tools is the first step is to image the raw data from the card onto a hard drive or similar, so you can then work with it all you want without worrying about doing more damage. I like to put it into an adapter that has a “write protect” switch on it just to be extra safe during that imaging phase.
I came across that Easeus site.
Did that work well?
It seems odd that I can just use a different software and get results. It worked for you?
I’ve used it many times (last time was a few years ago but it generally has been about the same over the years), they all work pretty similar. I’ve used Kroll Ontrack long ago too but Easeus is probably the most popular/common one these days.
They pretty much all have two levels, a basic recovery which is when the file system is messed up or you formatted something by accident, but the files are still largely intact, which is pretty quick and easy. Then there will be a deep scan that looks for patterns to try and identify really corrupted files but honestly I’ve always found that if that is needed, there is nothing useful left of the file anyway. But as I mentioned if you use it, the first step should be to image the card onto a hard drive before attempting any scanning or recovery. Then you can do multiple passes or toy around with it and not risk making the card worse and worse.
If you know a file name or date range that can help speed it up or filter it down too and make it easier to get through the results, but personally I like to let it scan and find everything then filter and sort after that.
Last time I used it was a standard SD card and saved most of my friend’s vacation photos, a few of them were gone. They had bought some cheap Temu or similar “waterproof” camera. It actually didn’t let water in, but best I could tell from playing around with it, if you pressed the power button too soon after taking a picture, it would corrupt the card, wasn’t smart enough to finish and close the write first.