Recovering lost/erased/formatted data from a drive is a real snake pit.
It's been my experience that no one program works in every circumstance. If the first one I try doesn't work sufficiently, I'll try another, and so on. Fortunately, many of the for-sale recovery programs have a demo version where only a limited amount of data will be recovered, such as 10 mb, or something like that. It's possible that the 'freebie' limit is too small to recover a .raw or .nef (I think that's what Nikon calls them) due to size.
For my own CF and SD drives, as they are all Sandisk, I have a number of their 'recovery' software cards that came with each of the drives. So far, the only time I've used one was on a friends Sandisk SD card that he had formatted over his doctoral thesis laboratory results. It failed miserably.
I don't recall if it was my own drive or a friends, but I had to fight my way through recovering what I could and found Recuva. I've used it successfully in a number of situations for non-computer savvy friends. But for the doctoral thesis guy, it found and recovered only a handful of the 70 or so files he claimed to have on the drive.
I also have Rescue Pro Deluxe installed. I don't recall having success with that one, but it might have been the one I recovered files from a friends' damaged DVD with with 30 short home made videos on it. I tried Rescue Pro Deluxe with the doctoral thesis SD and recovered more files that Recuva did, but still not all of them.
I also have EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard which I tested and then bought for the doctoral thesis SD. That one had the best results with the most recovered files.
BUT.....
For the doctoral thesis SD, it was, in actuality, some kind of database system where each of the files was somewhere in the database and various other of the files were used by the data base software to link them together into some kind of sequence/hierarchical and/or relational database structure. Not having access to the university-owned database program, I could not determine how it 'went together'. And not having recovered 100% of all the database tables/files, he said the database program couldn't 'put it together' either. I'm thinking there was some kind of table name/file name relationship information that wasn't recovered. He later told me that he ended up redoing the majority of the work.
In summary, sometimes it's a snap to recover lost data. It may be as simple as going to the 'recycle bin' on your computer and recovering the deleted files. I've long lost count of how many times I've done that, especially when choosing which images to edit with Lightroom as I delete the ones I've cut. There's been times when the first program I've tried works like a champ on someones hard drive or USB drive. Other times, it's the 2nd or 3rd program that does the trick.
The bottom line is if the first program you try doesn't get the results you need, then try the next one, until you do get what's needed, or, at least the best results/most files recovered.
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