Help a PA erased files off my HD!!!

[HDkilledFILM.]

Hello, as if my new movie couldn't get any worse I've lost some of my footage to a PA erasing a FCP project file all together!!! Whats worse is that I have no idea when he erased the file and have since emptied the trash!!! Is there anyway that I can get this footage back or am I doomed?!?!?!

[brian.wells]

I've used this program on my windows box when I accidentally removed a file.
Windows: Free Undelete (http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/)

For Mac OSX, I'm sure a little google search would help out you there, but I believe file deletion on macs, as on *nix machines, might be permanent (with the exception of time machine).

[Mattykins]

Files are never really ever deleted. Unless you rewrite your drive multiple times, you won't loose anything, technically. You just can't see it.

http://www.drivesavers.com/?gclid=CKCU78nx6pACFRgpIgodFH8nXg

These guys will be able to help you surely. Just depends on how much you are willing to spend on the recovery.

[ozduc]

FCP project files are NOT the footage files. You can erase a project file but your footage will still be on the drive in the capture scratch folder. What you would lose with the project file is any editing done in the timeline.

[ProfessorU]

Whatever else you do, STOP using the drives (including any swapfile) until you recover your data, so you don't accidentaly overwrite the files.

[cheezweezl]

and in the future, use autosave with fcp. it saves a copy of your project file every so often in a separate folder so you can always turn back the clock on an edit or dig up the latest version if a pa does the unthinkable.

come to think of it, maybe you were already doing this and didn't know it. do you have a folder anywhere called "autosave vault"? if so, check there....

[hennbot]

Whatever else you do, STOP using the PA!

[mainstreetprod]

"Files are never really ever deleted. Unless you rewrite your drive multiple times, you won't loose anything, technically. You just can't see it"


That's a hard one to believe. If I, let's say, have 50 gigs of footage on a drive,
(on my Mac) and delete it, the HD capacity reads unchanged- until I empty the
trash. Then I gain 50 gigs of capacity, according to the readout. How could 50 gigs
be stored somewhere out of sight? On a Mac, at least, it looks like deleted trash is
GONE.

[Stephen Mick]

Well, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but when you empty the trash, you're basically only telling the system that the space that those files were stored on is now available again. So, technically, the files are still there, at least until the sectors that held them are overwritten with new data.

Or something like that.

--SM

[TedRR]

You are correct SM.
Think of the drive as video tape. If you re-use the tape, you might have 20 minutes left to re- record on. The first 10 minutes is wiped out by new footage, but untill the record heads go over the remainder, the old footage is still there, even though the camera indicates you have 20 minutes left.

Maybe that wasn't a help? :grin:

The difference is how much trouble it is to read/access the data on the drive! :Drogar-Happy(DBG):
Let us know what you use if you do. Some applications work better then others. I've fortunately never needed this.

[Mattykins]

Well this is something that always confuses people. I took a crash course in cybersecurity a few years after 911 when the US government decided they needed to beef up their internet security staff. So basically they offered a bunch of high schoolers jobs working for the government. It was pretty cool.

But, hard drives always retain their information. You just can't get at it. When they write, the information in encoded in the disk. You go to delete something - empty the trash lets say, all the computer does is say, alright, this information is "not here" and I can put something else on it. When actually, it still exists on the disk. The computer just forgets about it. The only way to get rid of the encoded information is to overwrite it. Which is done by another file or by encoding a bunch of 1s and 0s on there to write over the drive. Basically what you would do if you were selling your computer. HOWEVER, the information can still be retrieved. Just it will be segmented. To actually get rid of information you need to overwrite your drive several times or physically destroy the drive in all entirety.

So technically, your information is still there. Even when you empty the trash. That's why law enforcement will jack your computer and go through the drives using people like drivesavers to break encoding and dig up what was "deleted". Computers and harddrives are pretty crazy things. It's kinda cool.

[ProfessorU]

You can't recover overwritten data without a large pile of $. You have to use a custom read head that has much more accuracy and sensitivity.

Basically, if your bit starts at 0 and is written to 1, it is actually .9 or so, rounded up by the hardware. Rewrite it to 0 and it's actually .1. Pulling a second or third layer of data off a drive is like trying to read writing by looking at the impressions on the second or third piece of paper in your notepad. Totally worthwhile if your drive belongs to Osama, but for the average person, it's not a real data recovery method.

[Mattykins]

I wasn't saying that its a cheap thing to do, nor easy. Just saying it can be done.