Quick format vs full format
A quick format only writes a fresh, empty file system on top of the drive — your old photos and documents are still sitting in the data area, untouched, until new files overwrite them. That's recoverable. A full format (or a "secure erase") that overwrites every sector is not recoverable, because the original bytes are physically gone. The good news: quick format is the default in Windows and on most cameras and cards.
Use Deep Scan — it carves the whole drive
After a format there's no reliable file table to read, so RecoverHelper falls back to signature carving: it scans the entire volume and reconstructs files by their format signatures. Choose Deep Scan (which runs the file-table pass and then carves everything) or Carving Only for a reformatted or raw volume. This works across FAT32, exFAT and raw volumes, and on Mac APFS/HFS+ disks too.
Don't write anything to the drive
Every new file you save to a formatted drive risks landing on top of the data you're trying to recover. So: don't reinstall the operating system onto it, don't copy files to it, and always recover to a different drive — RecoverHelper enforces this by blocking same-drive output. The source is opened strictly read-only, so the scan itself can never make things worse.
What you can get back
Photos (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, GIF, BMP, WebP, PSD), camera RAW, video, audio, documents (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, RTF) and archives (ZIP, RAR, 7Z). JPG and PNG recover right away; the rest, plus partial recovery of fragmented files, unlock for free by pairing the free RecoverHelper mobile app.