Is there a way to check when an SD card was last formatted

Question

My car was recently in the garage for its service and it has come out with damage (scrapes) to the bodywork both front driver side and rear passenger side. This particular garage has form and I have had previous incidents of the same damage (they tried to blame a cat scratching my car). It did not enter the garage in this state.

I went to check the front and rear cameras and found that the card has about a third of free space. Now this 32GB card overwrites itself when full. So I would assume that the card would be full and I would still be able to access footage from the previous day. I am suspicious that this card has been removed and formatted and then put back into my dashcam.

Is there a way to find out if and when the SD card has been formatted/erased?

Answer 1

• FAT16/FAT32 do not have this field (date of formatting): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system
• Exfat doesn't seem to retain this information either: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specification
• It is available for NTFS (but this date can be spoofed or just be wrong if the host system didn't have its time/date synchronized): Is it possible to determine when a NTFS partition was created?

For fat32/exfat you still can fire up any application which restores files, e.g. R-Studio Undelete and check the dates of deleted files (if there are any). If a lot of deleted files exist, that would be a good indication that it hasn't recently been formatted.