Recovering data from formatted SSD
Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2017 6:51 pmHello. I'm coming to you asking for help, as something very silly yet terrible happend yesterday.
Two SSDs containing most of a full day of shooting were formatted in camera (on two 2.5k Blackmagic Cinema Cameras) before having the footage backed up, but they realized this before shooting anything else on them. Apparently there was a labeling confusion, I don't yet know all the details, but I guess that's not important now.
The data manager asked me for help and I tried using Testdisk (actually, Photo Rec) and even though my tests on exFAT SDs and USB drives were succesful, the program didn't work on the SSDs. Somebody else then stepped in to help, using other programs (I don't know which) and after three tries he says he hasn't been able to recover anything.
From what little I was able to find I understand the BMCC does a "trim" operation when formatting the drives, to avoid dropped frames -this command also has to do with how SSDs work, apparently-. This was the most categorical assertion about this issue (and it's not auspicious at all): viewtopic.php?f=2&t=41901#p242628
Have any of you been able to succesfully recover footage from SSDs formatted in camera? Do you have specific tools you've achieved that with? Or is all of that footage effectively lost because of the way the BMCC does the formatting?
This is a very hard situation for the whole team, not only because of the potentially lost work, but also because reshooting that whole day is financially complicated. Hopefully you guys can help us on this.
Thank you for any replies.
Two SSDs containing most of a full day of shooting were formatted in camera (on two 2.5k Blackmagic Cinema Cameras) before having the footage backed up, but they realized this before shooting anything else on them. Apparently there was a labeling confusion, I don't yet know all the details, but I guess that's not important now.
The data manager asked me for help and I tried using Testdisk (actually, Photo Rec) and even though my tests on exFAT SDs and USB drives were succesful, the program didn't work on the SSDs. Somebody else then stepped in to help, using other programs (I don't know which) and after three tries he says he hasn't been able to recover anything.
From what little I was able to find I understand the BMCC does a "trim" operation when formatting the drives, to avoid dropped frames -this command also has to do with how SSDs work, apparently-. This was the most categorical assertion about this issue (and it's not auspicious at all): viewtopic.php?f=2&t=41901#p242628
Have any of you been able to succesfully recover footage from SSDs formatted in camera? Do you have specific tools you've achieved that with? Or is all of that footage effectively lost because of the way the BMCC does the formatting?
This is a very hard situation for the whole team, not only because of the potentially lost work, but also because reshooting that whole day is financially complicated. Hopefully you guys can help us on this.
Thank you for any replies.