Recover unsaved video?

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Level 1

35 points

Recover unsaved video?

I took a dozen videos today at a major coastal landmark, highlight of my vacation. But the one truly amazing video--a huge wave and massive crashing spray caught people by surprise and almost threw someone to the rocks--failed to save. The Camera app just locked up after I stopped recording and took 20 seconds to respond to the Home button. It doesn't appear in the Camera roll.

Is there any chance of recovering that video? Surely Apple wouldn't be so naive as to store video in RAM while it's recording, when flash memory is readily available and almost as fast!? Perhaps the video data was saved to flash memory, but the video headers etc just weren't set so Camera/Photos app can't recognize it?

This isn't the first time Camera.app has lost a photo or video on me, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime video shot. To say I was livid at losing it, would be an understatement.

Any chance of recovery at all? Don't care what tools might be involved. Unfortunately I've sync'ed it a couple of times to my Macbook since then so "corrupt" data may already have been erased.

iPhone 3GS, iOS 4.0.1

Macbook 2 GHz C2D, Mac OS X (10.6.4), 2 GB RAM

Posted on Sep 3, 2010 8:13 PM

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Answer 1

ChanaiCh Author

Level 1

35 points

Sep 5, 2010 6:38 AM in response to ChanaiCh

Managed to recover the video. The video was there, but as suspected the necessary metadata files hadn't been generated by the Camera app before it quit. For anyone running into this problem in the future this is what I did:

1. Backup iPhone in iTunes
2. run "iPhone Backup Extractor", click Read Backup, and select the backup you just did
3. select "iOS Files" at the bottom of the list, and click "Extract". It will take several minutes for the program to extract all the Apple-related app data to your selected folder
4. Camera roll photos and movies at the extracted files folder are at "iOS Files/Media/DCIM/xxxApple/" (where xxx is 100, 101, etc)
5. Scan the filenames of photos and movies imported into iPhoto. They're sequentially numbered, so if there's one missing (e.g. IMG_1010.MOV) which you didn't already delete from iPhone or iPhoto, look for it in the folder
6. Once found, import the MOV file into iPhoto manually

Very glad this worked.

Point of interest: each video has 5 metadata files stored at "iOS Files/Media/PhotoData/xxxApple/" The "missing" movie file didn't have any of them. Now I just have to figure out how to delete the movie file from the iPhone to recover the space...

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Recover *unsaved* video?

Recover unsaved video?