Real recoveries, real customers. We publish a new case every few weeks — what broke, what we did, and whether the data came back. Names are shortened for privacy.
A meeting had been recorded on a voice recorder — about two hours, the full session. When it ended, the user switched the recorder off without pressing the stop button first. On the recorder itself, the last recording wouldn't play back. Connected to a computer, the cause was visible: a final WAV file of exactly 0 bytes — present, unopenable, unplayable. Multiple recovery attempts failed, and the user turned to…
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Short answer first A .DAT file on a Canon camera card is your video — recorded, present, but never finalized into the MP4 your camera and computer expect. You can't open it with any player or editor, because it isn't damaged footage; it's complete footage inside an unfinished container. The fix is container remuxing, which converts the DAT to a fully playable MP4 without re-encoding — as we do routinely.…
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This case arrived in the client's own words, and they're worth quoting directly: "My SD cards somehow just completely wiped to nothing after shooting all day, but I recovered successfully all of the video files I needed except for 1 file, it is a 19.16 GB mp4 that I can't seem to repair like the others did." A full day of shooting, two cards wiped for reasons unknown, and a…
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It was 11 p.m. on a Saturday. A wedding videographer Peter in Madrid messaged us: rushing to prep cards for the after-party, she had formatted the wrong CFA card — the one holding the entire ceremony, 128 GB of footage from a SONY camera, not yet backed up anywhere. The problem In-camera format, full card, zero backup, and a client expecting a highlight film in three weeks. On the good…
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A father of two from Toronto wrote to us the day after returning from a two-week trip to Portugal. On the flight home, while freeing up space on the camera, he had selected what he thought was one clip — and confirmed "Delete All" on the card instead. The problem One tap. 80 videos and about 400 photos gone — beach days, a birthday celebration on the last night, the…
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A travel photographer in Melbourne plugged her Micro SD(TF) card into a MacBook Pro after a three-week shoot in New Zealand — 128 GB of landscapes, timelapses and a once-in-a-trip drone session she'd already copied to some of it. Instead of the usual Finder window, macOS greeted her with the dreaded dialog: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." Three buttons: Initialize…, Ignore, Eject. The problem This…
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A commercial pilot in Singapore was flying a resort promotional shoot when a gust of wind sent his drone into a palm tree. The drone survived with a cracked propeller. The footage did not — at first. The problem The last flight's file — a 12-minute 4K/60p MP4 from a DJI aircraft — showed a healthy file size (about 6.5 GB) but refused to play beyond the first two seconds.…
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This one arrived with a note that began: "Two other services already told me this is impossible." A broadcast crew in USA had been recording a 90-minute live panel with a Sony camera in HEVC. Halfway through, a venue power cut took down the camera mid-write. The problem On the CFA card, the recording existed as a single 78 GB .RSV file — Sony's temporary "recording-in-progress" format. RSV files have…
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A documentary shooter from Berlin contacted us on a Sunday evening, clearly stressed. During a fast card swap between interviews, she had pulled the SD card from her Canon R5 a second too early. The camera had not finished finalizing the last clips. The problem On the card, the last recording appeared not as normal MP4 file, but as .DAT file in size 0 KB — Canon's temporary container that…
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