Footage was there, now seemingly is not
Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 4:42 pmHello 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.
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.