hELP!!!
 

Hey, i have made a bid booboo, i have just finished a movie, and some how deleted the Dam folder that contained all the video clips from my ex3. now i have tried a data recovery app, Data Rescue, it has found all the small files, but i have a few long takes 3 to 4 gig in size, and it seems to skip over them, so is there any other app that will find large QT files. (I live in hope),
Rob.

you could try to reconnect with media manager, or start 'fresh' and reload the media and then reconnect (maybe less buggy)...

Sorry,

All the clips have been deleted, sent to trash, and trash was emptied.

What happens now? do you still have them on card.

Tech Tool Pro *might* be able to recover the data but unlikely. Your best bet is to re-injest the original footage.

all the cards were re used for another project,
i have t try and recover the deleted files, ??????

If you want to recover the files, your best bet would be to stop everything that you're doing right now. Do NOT move around big files, because that can overwrite the data you're trying to recover.

If Data Rescue didn't recover your files, then my guess is that you're out of luck. Data Rescue is one of the better data recovery applications on the Mac, so if you can't recover it, then I think you lost your data.

Sorry, but it sounds like the sad truth is that you're just out of luck.

When you delete a file, the actual data is still there at first, but the space is marked as available for use. If you immediately shut the system down and remove the hard drive, there is some hope for recovery by plugging the drive into another machine with recovery software installed. If you don't do this immediately, then any writes to the drive may overwrite the data.

If you installed recovery software on the same disk that you were hoping to recover files from, it's likely that the act of writing the recovery software files to the disk has overwritten at least some of the data that you were hoping to recover.

Your best bet at this point would be a pro recovery service but it will be very expensive and the results depend on how much was overwritten.

Nobody in their right mind reuses source media before an ongoing project is completed unless the data has been backed up ... including you too in future. Do you not have any king of backup system in place at all? How about Time Machine? Were the files originally delivered on any kind of intermediate device, another hard drive perhaps? How about interim builds of your project? Have you created any self contained quicktime movies along the way that may have contained essential parts of the original media that you can rescue some shots from?

If this turn of events represents more than just a harsh reminder of best practices then you might want to try AeroQuartet's movie repair service ... start by downloading the "Treasured" test app. Ultimately though it sounds like you need to do a low level data scrape. I hope you quarantined that drive ...

Treasured • Download

ouch. the phrase that always runs through my mind is: 'if you don't have it in two (or more) places, you don't have it at all.'
i sincerely wish you luck. i remember losing my video thesis project in fine arts when i pressed 'save' on an amiga, the whole thing locked up, i could only restart, and all my edits were lost. this was at 5 am, after working all night, and it was due that day. i actually fell to my knees and did the 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!' from every cheesy movie you've ever seen... one of the best lessons i learned...

and to think, in elementary school they had those signs above every computer that said 'save often'

if you do video editing and aren't backing up, you shouldn't be too upset when your data gets lost. This also speaks volumes about why tape is still the superior method of recording.
While I can't offer a solution for you, I can offer my condolences, it's happened to me ( and probably 90% of us here) at some point or another.

there were no computers when i was in elementary school. and we had to put stamps on our mail... (mmmmm: licking glue!). and people actually LIKED feathered hair!!!!!
wow, suddenly i'm old.

I actually do incremental saves to avoid this exact thing. Any major edit gets an incremental number increase, partly so I can revert to a previous version if I really mess stuff up, partly to avoid overwriting a project file and having the system crash.

Shaun's Video Project v1.0
Shaun's Video Project v1.1
Shaun's Video Project v2.0 (MAJOR changes and/or clients have viewed and made commentary)

Thank for the help so far. I have back 98% of what i lost :-) Now i have a 2 gig QT File that will not open, i used a app called File Juicer √√√√

File Juicer - Extract images from PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel and other Files on Mac OS X

that lets you sort of open the file, it converts it t a mpg video file. no sound but, and i can see most of the video. It seem to me that the header of the qt file is damaged. So my question who know of any one out there that can try to repair the Qt header, i have found so info on it but you need to no about java, and i do not. So any help would be great, I will be happy to burn the qt file on to a dvd and post it to any one that wants to have a go.
i found these 2 links,

web3null: how to fix a broken quicktime mov file

web3null: how to fix a broken quicktime mov file

Rob.,

Rob...

Just a helpful suggestion: Keep backups of your original camera files. It will allow you to fall back to something in case your working drive goes bad or something else fails.

We read about files being lost on hard drives all the time on this board. The suggested recovery processes are terribly expensive. And the best way to prevent a catastrophe is simple and not too costly: Keep backups.