So after shopping around, I sent the SD card to a Data Doctors storefront in Arizona. The person I had spoken with seemed very optimistic, despite my very detailed description of the situation, and this provided me with hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. I later discovered this person participated as only a "middle-man" between myself and the "experts".
The diagnosis had cost a nonrefundable $90, and successful data recovery would cost an additional $210. I awaited three business days for a response.
The call I received was very unnerving. The "expert" had shared with me the results of the diagnosis, which were exactly equivalent with what I had independently discovered using free diagnosis software from the internet. (416 data chunks, 10 of which were recoverable pictures, the remaining were unrecoverable, fragmented video files).
What was most unnerving was that I had told the "middle-man" that I was very concerned the video files were truncated, and this "middle-man" didn't even know what truncated meant, but reassured me regardless that Data Doctors has over a 95% recovery rate.
I spoke with the "expert's" supervisor (to here on out be referred to as "super-expert"), and requested a refund for the nonrefundable diagnosis on the basis of the "middle-man's" ignorance of his own profession. The "super-expert" made a few fallible arguments that there was indeed a possibility to recover the data regardless of the original information I had presented to the "middle-man" (IE: that the file allocation table is sometimes recoverable, but really, this is only true if the partition table had been damaged and not formatted). The "super-expert" started talking in very long circles, apparently trying to confuse me with irrelevant technical jargon that would likely confuse his average customer. To avoid any further aggravation, I cut my losses of $90 and left to pick-up the SD card.
When I returned to the Data Doctors store front to pick up the SD card, the invoice stated, "data-recovery not possible due to low-level format". Really? Now they're claiming I did a low-level format? Fucking horseshit.
tl;dr:Use
Recuva (Windows only) to recover data from formatted partitions. (will not piece together fragmented files, but if the file-type is not complicated, it may be possible for you to piece it back together yourself)
Use
TestDisk (All OSes) to fix damaged partition tables. (will not recover a formatted partition table)
Use a professional data recovery company ONLY IF your drive has been physically damaged or cannot be accessed by your computer, or if all else has failed and you have good reason to believe they can help you out.
