Is it possible to recover saves from a formatted Switch?

[yankii]

So I'd lent my Switch V1 to a friend and they returned it to me formatted. Thankfully most of my saves were dumped but I didn't have TotK backed up for some reason and I don't want to lose 200 hours of progress.

I haven't touched it at all, so as to not overwrite anything. I assume everything is still there on the NAND, but is recovery possible?

 

[thesjaakspoiler]

I don't think so.
When you format a Switch, it wipes the user partition so then all user relates data will be gone.
I don't know of any tools which would be able to recover raw data from an emmc.
You could at least try to make a dump of the NAND and start looking for such a tool.
The dump of the NAND does contain all data, it is not a file based copy.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[hippy dave]

Did you try punching your friend in the face?

 

[The Real Jdbye]

So I'd lent my Switch V1 to a friend and they returned it to me formatted. Thankfully most of my saves were dumped but I didn't have TotK backed up for some reason and I don't want to lose 200 hours of progress.

I haven't touched it at all, so as to not overwrite anything. I assume everything is still there on the NAND, but is recovery possible?

Ex-friend, I hope?

As far as I know the partitions aren't a standard partition type that any data recovery program would be able to recognize. And due to wear leveling of flash, it's hard to recover the partition table as once it's deleted that free space can get shuffled around and it's not where the data recovery program expects it to be and maybe not even in one piece.
As well as that, the files aren't a standard type that raw recovery could find based on a header (but even if it was, raw recovery only works on a sector based level, so you would only recover 64kb (or whatever your sector size is set to) chunks of files, not very useful if your files are bigger than that)

Back in the day DSOrganize corrupted my DS flash cart's microSD and I tried everything to recover the .sav files, and all I was able to recover was a bunch of random images. I feel your pain, but it's probably a lost cause.

 

[Hayato213]

If you didn't have a NAND backup with the save or backup the save then no.