ZoomH4 - bumped during recording, possible to salvage file?

M

Marshallarts

Well-known member
Hi,

I have a ZoomH4 field recorder. Awhile back I was at a concert. I thought I would record the entire show uninterrupted (without hitting stop or pause). I was in the stands and set the recorder down on top of something with the microphones pointed at the stage. About 15 minutes into it some jerk rushes past and knocks it down.

Immediately it appeared as if whatever it was I recorded was lost. There was a WAV file saved (STE-000.wav) but its size is Zero KB. It wouldn't play back anything from that file and it appeared the file was empty, what was recorded now gone.

Learning from that mistake I realized from then on I will stop recording after every song and begin a new one. Doing so will officially save the file and begin another. Having not done that when the unit was knocked over it lost the entire recording since it was contained in one file.

Once home I tried downloading my recordings. Everything is wonderful except that first file which still reads Zero KB.

Is there anyway to recover that? Does anyone have experience with this?

thank you
 
Well not to delve too deeply in to the legal issues of recording a concert... But in many venues you would have lost more than the file if caught.

Anyway the answer to your question is no, it's gone. It might have been possible to recover IF you had removed the card and recorded the rest of the concert on a new card but you almost certainly have recorded over that first file. What you have is a directory entry that points to a non existent file. If you really want to give it a try you can get file recovery software that might be able to recover the file IF it hasn't been written over. Most run close to $100 but many have a trial that will let you recover one file to see if it will work for you. They take a LONG time to work and as I said I doub't that you have anything recoverable at this point but???
 
If you're running windows, you could try out recuva it's a pretty good free file recovery apps. As Noiz said, odds are whatever had been recorded was overwritten, but its worth a shot.
 
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