The steps required to recover deleted files vary according to the difficulty of locating those damaged or deleted files. Take for example the situation where we need to recover files that were accidentally deleted from a camera SD card. Advantages to scanning for lost files on an SD card are that the relative size of the solid state digital media is small compared to that of a huge internal hard disk drive. Therefore the scanning process takes a considerably shorter amount of time.
The disadvantages involved in file recovery from a camera SD card are that the file types by which the original digital information were stored in on that card are not always recognizable by your data recovery tool. So, while file recovery from external media such as an SD card or USB flash drive is basically fast and simple, locating their file types commonly placed on those drives is not. A further example of a difficult data recovery task would be locating recently deleted files from a crashed hard drive. If one has reloaded their operating system and subsequently reformatted the hard disk drive any files that had been accidentally deleted from that drive are now doubly deleted.