Cautionary Tale - Loss of EX1 data
 

After getting in a bit of a mess with the Sony Clip Browser software, I decided to start again and clicked to delete a clip from the bottom panel, thinking I was just deleting it from the browser. It deleted everything - four continuous clips lasting about 50 mins, from a 16 Gb SxS card!!!

It wasn't for a paid job, but it was irreplaceable personal footage, so unless there's some miraculous way of recovering data as you sometimes can with disk drives, I've lost the lot!

Big lesson - copy everything first.

But ... does anyone know whether, if I've not recorded anything else onto the same card, whether the data might still be "there" but invisible??

Were you working off the SxS card itself or SXS files that had been downloaded onto the computer? If its the latter my guess is the files ought to be there somewhere on your disk but i wouldn't do anything with the disk until you find someone who can recover files - I'm no expert though.


If you were working from the disk i don't know. It does point up a cardinal rule though that most people working with the P2 system have held to. Never work with them or important them directly into your computer from the P2 or SxS disk itself. Always first copy them to the hard drive. The main concern there is the possibility of corruption, but this is another case in point.

Good luck

Lenny Levy

The data may well still be there if you haven't further messed with the card yet, but you'll need some sort of file utility to check. There are several free file recovery utilities available on the internet and I used one of them successfully on a Firestore drive, but I can't remember which one. Here's a Google list:

http://www.google.com/search?q=free+file+recovery

Presuming that the file system operates like most any other disk based storage, the data is still there, as long as you don't do ANYTHING that would record over it. Sony even had a utility to recover files off their memory sticks for just such a reason - don't think it would work on the new cards, but any disk recovery utility that can access the card (I'm presuming it shows up as a "drive" somehow?) should be able to restore the file information.

Usually it's like if someone threw out the index cards at the library - the books are all still there, just no guide to show you how to find and read them - a file restore/recovery utility puts all the index information back so the stupid computer can find the 1's and 0's again!

You might contact Sony support - I'd bet they have something, as I can't imagine this is all that unusual...

Copy Data to hard drive. Copy that to DL-DVD. Don't delete anything from the hard drive until that DL-DVD is burned. Delete from card ONLY after the data is at least copied to the hard drive.

Search and Recover is made just for this kind of thing, pretty good from what I understand.

http://www.iolo.com/sr/4/

- Ray

All of the above is good advice but there's another reason why you should copy files to the HDD first. If you have a clip split over two cards you cannot join it from the mxf files and the clip browser will not be able to stitch the files as it can only access one card at a time.

Would search and recover work on the SxS or on a P2 card though? Wouldn't it be a different file structure?

It's a pretty straight forward rule: As long as your computer can mount the media (HD, floppy, disc, CD, DVD, whatever) the recovery program can do its miracle and read your seemingly deleted files - which did not really get deleted, just their name(s) in the directory. Even if you messed around with the media in the meantime, there is a good chance to be able to recover a few of the files, however no parts of them, only those that were not affected with your messing around.
You have mostly no chance at all to recover deleted files if you reformatted your media in the meantime.

Hope this helps

Which computer or operating system are you working with?

I'm on a mac which does not seem to be covered by Search and recover. must a Mac equivilent though.

My guess would be that the SxS cards use FAT32 formatting; not sure about P2.

Disk Warrior is a highly touted tool for file and disc recovery on the Mac platform.

-gb-

Thanks for all the replies - I've tried a couple of downloaded recovery programs without success so far, so I've just (Monday morning) taken the card and card reader to my local Computer shop in the hope that .......

will report the results.

I wouldnt take it to you local computer store. Unless they have people that know how to do it they might do more damage. Look on google for a place near your house that does data recovery. It will cost you but those places usually have a very high rate of recovery.

Here is help for you
 

Try this link:

www.sandisk.com

and search for Rescue Pro. This will direct you to the download site.

I've be well served with that app.

Hope this helps