Can you restore a formatted SXS Card - Help!

[Stephen Cross]

Hi guys, I stupidly formatted a SXS card after shooting some very nice footage.

I don't suppose there is a way to retrieve, I heard that these cards don't actually delete data until they are recorded on again?

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[emotepix]

AFAIK, once you can see the data on your computer, Mac or PC, you can treat the data like any other data. i.e. if you haven't recorded over anything since you formatted, you may be able to use an undelete utility to recover your erased files.

You didn't say if you were on Mac or PC. Usually it's easier in PC, since Sony doesn't make Macs.

Oh .. or, of course, you may not have transferred your data off your cards at all, in which case I'd say your chances are *perhaps* slimmer.

If you were seeing BPAV foders during your normal course of work, then even though you technically deleted the files, what MOST systems (and I may well be wrong about the SxS system) do is to overwrite the first character of the filename with a dot or a blank.
This tells the OS that it's okay to overwrite that memory spot with something new.

So if you have not recorded anything over the data you formatted away, a program like PC Tools or Norton Utilities *may* be able to restore the original files and folders.

You'll still have a bit of a dance to get the files to be usable again after that, and the method of recover depends again on Mac or PC.

But for now that's quite enough information to take off in one bite...

HTH
Cheers
Chris