Footage was there, now seemingly is not

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ethanxatris

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Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostTue Jul 18, 2023 4:42 pm

Hello Internet,

I had a bit of a weird experience with my BMPCC4K today. I was filming BRAW 4K DCI Q3 all morning onto a 1TB Samsung T5 SSD, which already had 11GB of BRAW footage from the previous day. Since there was very little data on it already, and I didn't plan on shooting much that day, I didn't format it beforehand. After reviewing the footage on my camera, which looked good, I went home to back up and edit. However, when I plugged the T5 into my PC (running Windows 11, in case that's relevant), the 11GB of footage from yesterday showed up, but none of the clips I shot today were visible. The new clips also failed to appear in Resolve, my Windows laptop, and my Android phone. Strangely, when inspecting the properties of the drive, Windows claimed that 38.7GB of space was used on the SSD. Digging deeper revealed that 27.6GB of that was attributed to "System & Reserved" space. I suspect the 27.6GB is the footage I shot today, and it's unusual as my other external hard drives with terabytes of used space have only a few kilobytes of "System & Reserved" marked usage.

Now that I have told my fun tale, time for questions. Is there any way to recover my missing footage for free? Luckily, this was a general B-roll shoot, so I can fairly easily re-film it, though it would be a bit of a pain. Due to that, I don't feel like paying for data recovery. The second question, which is more important, is what caused this, and how can I prevent it from happening again? Fortunately, as I just said, this happened during a casual B-roll shoot, but for my job, I often record people whose schedules are booked out for months, and reshooting is not possible. The SSD was not unplugged until after the camera was fully shut down, and it was handled with care. Is it finally time to retire my T5, as it has been going strong for about 4 years, or may it perhaps be a problem with the camera itself?

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for your help.

Here are some things I have already tried:
Using other devices—I have not tried on a Mac yet, but I will update this if it works.
Enabled "Show hidden files and folders".
Manually checked for hidden files using the command prompt.
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Uli Plank

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostTue Jul 18, 2023 6:28 pm

Do the clips play in the camera?
My desaster protection: export a .drp file to a physically separated storage regularly.

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ethanxatris

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostTue Jul 18, 2023 6:39 pm

Uli Plank wrote:Do the clips play in the camera?

They did before I first plugged the SSD into my PC, but after doing that only the clips that show up on my PC playback.
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Howard Roll

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostTue Jul 18, 2023 6:41 pm

The only help I can offer is some observational insight.

The number of posts RE: recording to external drives outnumber the posts RE: Cfast issues by a massive ratio.

Good Luck
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Marshall Harrington

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostTue Jul 18, 2023 8:11 pm

Have you checked the cables to your camera and your computer?
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rick.lang

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Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostWed Jul 19, 2023 5:28 pm

Deleted
Last edited by rick.lang on Thu Jul 20, 2023 6:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Rick Lang
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danielpanev

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostThu Jul 20, 2023 4:34 am

Is there any possibility that you record on another media the second day?
I remember a case like yours and finally the mystery was solved - the guy had a CF card also inserted and the camera recorded there instead of the SSD...
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bobosola

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostThu Jul 20, 2023 4:01 pm

Another thought, grasping at straws really. It's really weird that the older files are still there, but a whole day's worth of files just went missing together, especially after you saw at least some of them on the camera. I'm wondering if you accidentally deleted the recent stuff off the drive somehow?

External drives (I believe) now use the regular recycle bin by default in Win 11 but can also be set up to have their own hidden bin on the drive itself. If that's the case, it might explain why you have a lot of stuff in the System & Reserved section when viewing the drive properties? Making a hidden external drive recycle bin visible needs more than just showing hidden files though: here's an article on Managing a recycle bin on an external drive from MS support. Might be worth trying that to see if your stuff somehow got into a hidden external drive recycle bin?
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ethanxatris

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostThu Jul 20, 2023 6:51 pm

Howard Roll wrote:The only help I can offer is some observational insight.

The number of posts RE: recording to external drives outnumber the posts RE: Cfast issues by a massive ratio.

Good Luck

Yeah, I know,
I have been avoiding CFast for a while because it's nearly a dollar per gigabyte, but I just finally bought my first one. I do not want to risk this happening again, and I am planning on getting an Ursa Mini G2 in the not too distant future, and it has a less elegant SSD solution than the BMPCC4K.
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ethanxatris

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Re: Footage was there, now seemingly is not

PostThu Jul 20, 2023 6:52 pm

danielpanev wrote:Is there any possibility that you record on another media the second day?
I remember a case like yours and finally the mystery was solved - the guy had a CF card also inserted and the camera recorded there instead of the SSD...

Unfortunately no; that is the first thing I checked because I have done that before.

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