Can i recover data from a copied SD card?

[MilloMille]

I had Raspbian running on ym Raspberry but I somehow messed it up. Because I couldnt fix it and could find help online, I decided to reinstall Raspbian. Because I wanted to keep some old files I kept on the desktop I copied the SD card to an USB stick beforehand. Is there any possible way to get my data back from this copy?
I opened the root.tar.xz but the desktop folder is empty.

[RaTTuS]

yes - depends
how did you copy themn
what do the files look like

[B.Goode]

I'd say it's unlikely...

From your description I guess you have (had) a NOOBS Installer SD card, and when you made a 'backup' you copied the content of the Recovery partition, which is the only part of the card that Windows can see by default. This contains only the files needed to boot the NOOBS Installer, not any of the files you created with your installed version of Raspbian. The file you name is the image from which NOOBS installs Raspbian onto the SD card: it does not reflect any changes made after installation.

Let's hope I am wrong...

If you copied the entire raw content of the card using a tool such as Win32DiskImager or the Clone tool shipped with Raspbian Jessie the situation might be recoverable.

[MilloMille]

Sorry for the late response. Unfortunately I did it excatly the way you described it. I copied the content from the SD card with NOOBS onto my hard drive without any special software. Guess the files are lost then. I did a backup of the files not too long ago so it is not that bad but thanks for the answer

[DavidS]

Sorry for the late response. Unfortunately I did it excatly the way you described it. I copied the content from the SD card with NOOBS onto my hard drive without any special software. Guess the files are lost then. I did a backup of the files not too long ago so it is not that bad but thanks for the answer

If you still have the original SD Card (and have not used it for anything else since then), you can put it into an SD Card reader on any system with Linux (or BSD, Haiku OS, MiNIX, etc), and read the ext4 partition on the SD Card. That simple.

If you overwrote the SD Card the data is probably lost, sorry.