If the footage is really important contact Sony. They have a data recovery service.

That's funny!

When I unfortunately trashed some files and rang up Sony Australia, I was told no such service exists, although there was talk of it on forums when the format first started.

Cheers,

Vaughan

There is a Sony office in France that is dedicated to data recover and media restoration. It called Sony Professional Media Services I believe. I think there is a similar service in the USA. I know they have recovered data from damaged cards and XDCAM disks. I doubt it's a free service in the case of recovering media from an erased card.

Why does it appear from where I'm sitting that Sony customers in Europe get far better treatment than those of us in the USA? Is it something we said or did?

Might be why we pay so much more for the same piece of kit.

How would someone recover data if the same situation happened with an SDHC card? A hard drive recovery service?

OK, I thing I am going to give up trying to recuperate these files. First of all I did the wrong transfer process by using Windows Explorer. It worked well until last week. But failed last time with no warning. I have taken good note of what Craig Seeman said.
I was really sad to loose all the clips of my Christmas party.
But this sadness has been offset by the happyness of having found that now I can use 16 Gb SDHC Cards at $30 to replace the $800 SxS Sony cards to save my future clips.

But I cant find how to copy the contents of the SxS card into my laptop. I have the version 2.0 of the XDCAM Clip browser. In the meny, I can specify as you said "Copy all to: " and then I specify the directory in my laptop. Then what should I do after that? I found nothing in the menu bar at the top which guide me on how to retreive these files !!

In ClipBrowser preferences, you point where the files go. They should be at that location. Once you do that you can point the bottom window (you can actually open several) to that location to confirm their arrival. Of course you need to be careful no to delete from that location.

Go in here Aero Quartet: Video gets Personal on your Mac they have this software called Treasured that can get the files from a formated sxs card or SD card. It's a specialiced software, it costs about $159 but it works, i saved a whole project ($1800 worth) with this guy

but you can ask
Customer Service Department
ALERT TECHNIK
Clos des Bellevues – Bât B
Avenue du Gros Chêne
95610 ERAGNY
France
Phone: +33 1 34 30 76 40
Fax: +33 1 34 64 45 38
seems they are still working for compact flash
Storage & Recording Media*|* Sony Support Europe

Do you buy the app, or do you have to pay per file recovered?

I had an error few years ago where a card had been accidentally ejected while still recording. When copied by clip browser, the final clip - 30 min or so never showed up. However the clip was on the card. I also tried copying the card with the finder and found I could open the clip fine with log and transfer in Final Cut Pro.

I posted here and a Sony rep saw the post ,took it very seriously, contacted me to learn the details and then later said the problem was now fixed in an upgraded version.

The entire affair left 2 tastes in my mouth. One I was very impresssed by how Sony handled it, but on the other hand it made me wary of Clip Browser & I always check to make sure all my shots are there. I think the safest routine may be what a friend of mine does. He uses the finder to copy his cards then using Get Info, he double checks the number of bites on the BPAV folders of the original card vs the copy. He says if the bites match exactly - the card is copied exactly. Clip Browser copies won't match exactly though.

What I still like about Clip Browser is still that I can put multiple cards into a single BPAV folder, which simplifies workflow, and it re-links spanned cards from the get-go.

Duplicate hard drive copies before erasing anything of course!!!! ALWAYS!

Lenny Levy