Recover Sony ARW photos after formatting in camera

Sony bodies (Alpha 7 series, A1, A9, the 6000-series APS-C cameras, the ZV line) write RAW as ARW. Format the card in the camera and the files are still on it; the format rewrites the exFAT (or FAT32, on smaller cards) directory structures and leaves the data clusters alone. The recovery itself is routine. What trips people up is what the recovered files look like afterwards, because ARW hides inside a format almost every tool already recognizes.

ARW is a TIFF-based RAW format. The first four bytes of an ARW are `49 49 2A 00`, which is the little-endian TIFF signature. A generic carver sees that signature and labels the file `.tif`. So do Nikon NEF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2 (mostly), Hasselblad 3FR, Leica RWL and Phase One IIQ. If you've run a free carver on a Sony card and ended up with a folder of `.tif` files that Preview won't open, that's what happened. The bytes are a perfectly good ARW; the extension is wrong, and macOS picks the decoder by extension.

You can fix that by hand (rename `.tif` to `.arw` and it opens) but on a card with two thousand frames it's a chore, and if there's a mix of cameras on the card you have no way to tell them apart by eye.

When the deep scan carves a TIFF-signature file, it doesn't stop at the signature. It parses the first image file directory and reads the EXIF `Make` tag, then promotes the extension to match: Sony becomes `.arw`, Nikon `.nef`, Olympus `.orf`, Panasonic `.rw2`, Hasselblad `.3fr`, Leica `.rwl`, Phase One `.iiq`, and a DNG (identified by its `DNGVersion` tag rather than the maker) becomes `.dng`. Genuine TIFFs stay `.tiff`. Canon CR2 has its own signature and is labeled directly. The upshot is that a carved Sony card comes back as `.arw` files that open in Preview, Photos, Lightroom and Capture One without a rename pass.

Thumbnails in the results grid and Quick Look previews come from the JPEG preview Sony embeds in every ARW, so you can see each frame before deciding whether to recover it. That's free and needs no account.

Stop using the card. Put it in a reader, open DataRecover Pro, select the card, and run a quick scan. An in-camera format on exFAT often leaves fragments of the old directory readable, and if it does the quick scan returns files with their original `DSC01234.ARW` names and folder paths. Recover those to a different drive.

If the quick scan is empty (the usual case after a format), run a deep scan. It carves by signature and labels as described above. Filenames are lost in this path; everything else, including capture time, lens and exposure, is inside the file, so sort by date in your editor afterwards. Expect the scan to take a while on a large, fast card because it reads every byte; imaging the card first is unnecessary unless the card is misbehaving.

If you deleted frames in-camera (or on the Mac after copying, then emptied the Trash on the card) and never formatted, you're in better shape. exFAT keeps the directory entry for a deleted file with a single flag flipped, and the clusters it points to stay untouched until the camera reuses them. The quick scan reads those entries directly and gives you the ARWs back with their original names, DCIM paths and correct lengths. There's no carving involved, so fragmentation isn't a concern and the files are byte-for-byte what the camera wrote.

Two things spoil this. Continuing to shoot on the card reuses the freed clusters, starting with the ones nearest the front, and the deleted directory entry itself is overwritten when new files land in the same folder. And Sony's "Recover Image DB" prompt, which appears when the card's database is inconsistent, rewrites the card's database files; answer it after recovery, not before. Also check the second slot: many Alpha bodies are set to write RAW to slot 1 and JPEG to slot 2, or to mirror both, and the other card may already hold what you need.

Sony bodies write a few companions you may or may not want. If you shot RAW+JPEG, each frame has a matching `.JPG` that carves separately and will appear in the same results. Video clips (XAVC S) are MP4 files and carve as such. The camera also writes small database and thumbnail files (`.BIN`, `.XML`) in `PRIVATE/M4ROOT` and `DCIM`; these will show up in a deep scan as generic files and you can ignore them.

A file that was partly overwritten before you recovered it will have a valid start (header, EXIF, preview) and damaged sensor data, and the RAW decoder will refuse it or render a partial frame. DataRecover Pro's repair engine can rebuild the TIFF structure around intact data, and where the sensor data itself is gone, it extracts the embedded full-size JPEG preview as a salvage. A JPEG is not a RAW, but it's the photograph, and it's the honest ceiling for a file whose RAW bytes are no longer on the card. The repair overview covers how that fallback is presented.

Download DataRecover Pro, scan the card, and use the thumbnails to judge which frames came back whole before paying anything. If it can't recover your files, you don't pay.

Shooting on the card after the format overwrites the oldest data first; whatever was overwritten is gone. A Sony body's "Format" is quick and recoverable, but some third-party card tools do a full erase that isn't. A card that shows the wrong capacity, hangs the reader, or isn't detected has a hardware fault; try a different reader once, then stop and consult a lab. And if the frames were on the camera's internal buffer and never finished writing when the battery died, there's nothing on the card to recover.