Recover data from encrypted SD card

Question

I have an HTC Butterfly phone and what I did was I ordered a new SD card with much larger memory. I had my previous card encrypted already and took that out and inserted my new card in.

The phone asked me to encrypt it again else the new inserted card would remain read-only. So, I did that. And now when I insert my old card in my phone again I cannot access data of my old card through the phone as the phone says the format is incorrect or the card is damaged and in order to use it I need to format it again.

Is there any way in which I can access the data from my old card? I cannot access it through my PC as it is encrypted already.

I have Android 4.3 and HTC Sense 5.5

Answer 1

Deleted photos, yes. Encrypted photos, no. If PhotoRec or ZAR can't recover them, they're gone. (ZAR even bypasses the CPU in the SD card, so it doesn't matter if the card is accessible or not.) and they can only recover data that looks like photos. "Data" that looks like random data (which is what an encrypted file looks like) isn't "recoverable" with file recovery techniques. The encryption algorithm used in Android, due to the limited processing power, isn't unbreakable. This is the reason that ALL important files should be backed up to at least 2 independent devices. If you don't have the time to do the backup, the files weren't that important.

Answer 2

Plain text data recovery can be done using a straightforward process like using any data recovery tool. But encrypted data or cipher text recovery cannot be done. Only the proper decryption can restore the data. So make it sure to decrypt the data before removing storage device. After removing storage drive like SD card without decryption, it is very difficult to restore data from the drive.