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Activity Forums DSLR Video Footage Deleted By Accident

  • Footage Deleted By Accident

    Posted by Christian Bell on August 24, 2011 at 10:10 pm

    Hi, I am in need of some serious help. I know I’m going to sound dumb haha, but please I need all the help I can get. This summer I went to Europe and got about a months worth of footage all over. I transferred it to one computer through the software that came with the camera. The camera is a Canon 7D. This computer it was all on had run out of memory and my father needed to use it for work so I copied all the info on my SmartBook external hard drive. I dragged the .MOV files into a folder I created on the EHD. It copied them all in .THM instead of .MOV onto the EHD. I then deleted the .MOV footage off my fathers computer by moving it into the trash then emptying it, assuming everything went over smoothly. These .THM files are apparently preview files and I can’t open them. So what I am getting at is that I need a way to get this footage back. Is it possible? Can I convert these .THM to .MOV? Please Help! Thanks!

    Steve Crow replied 14 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Steve Crow

    September 6, 2011 at 4:12 am

    Dude, I’m sorry to tell you that the .thm files merely hold the meta information about your clip, not the clip itself. So no you can’t go from the .thm to the .mov

    However….SOME of the .mov files you deleted may actually still be on your father’s computer. Unless you did some sort of special “secure delete” normal deleting only sets a flag that removes the file from you searches, it’s actually still there on the hard drive UNTIL another file overwrites it because it needs the space.

    Search the Web for Un-Delete software and you may be able to recover some of your movies back, a lot depends upon how many new files your father has put on the machine in the meantime and how much data was actually overwritten.

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