Crashed hard drive/video files problems

[Nigel O’neill]

Bob, I don’t believe that there is a solution to determine that. I had a similar problem a few years back. Some ‘technician’ once formatted my father’s portable HDD which contained his backup and used it to backup his system during a repair, apparently not noticing it contained files and that he had provided for restoration purposes. I was able to use a utility to recover all of his files (luckily the backup file table had not been overwritten AND the space had not been reused). The downside was that the file date information was reset to the current date. On the upside, I got 100% of his files back.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Bob Moyer]

Nigel,
Thank you for your reply. That is just what I am facing now. I was hoping that there might be a utility in existence that might help but after searching various websites I fear that I am in trouble concerning the recovery of the ‘recording’ date.
Bob

[Steve Rhoden]

Sorry, after a data recovery the original recording date
isnt gonna be visible.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia
1-876-461-9019

[Bob Moyer]

Thanks Steve, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear…I was hoping for a miracle (just a small one).

Bob

[Steve Rhoden]

lol, i know. But look at the bright side, you got back your files.
They could have been gone for good.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia
1-876-461-9019

[Dave Haynie]

FYI: I wrote the best disc data recovery program, in the 80s and early 90s, for an early multimedia-friendly computer system that’s perhaps faded from popular memory for some time (“DiskSalv”, for the Amiga OS). I have about ten years of experience in recovering data from bad discs.

Much of this is file system dependent. When you do a file recovery, the software for this will not necessarily trust the existing file system information, and perform a linear low-level scan, to build a model of that disc independent of the existing (or damaged) file system root information.

When directory and file information is available, there’s an awfully good chance the date information of the original file is available as well. But it is file system dependent. It’s common for the file name and data to be stored in the same locale, so if they’re restoring the original file names, there’s a pretty good chance the original dates were there as well.

It’s nearly impossible that a full restore of your original drive found 99% of every file and file name but missed the creation or modification dates. If some dates are missing and some restored, that may even be a little reassuring, that your videos lived but the date data perished. You lost a less-valuable thing. But if they’re all day-of-restoration, that’s pretty much a certainty that their restoration tool didn’t even try to do file date restoration.

-Dave

[Bob Moyer]

Dave,
Thanks for the additional clarification. So far I have found only two files that were blank/corrupt. Out of the hundreds on the drive, I can live with those odds. The files still have their original sequential numbering (0001.avi,0002.avi- in their individual folders) it is just that they are all of my grandchildren from 2000 to 2010 and when I named the folders, I didn’t have the foresight to put a date in the name. Oh well, I learned a very important lesson!

Bob

[Stephen Crye]

For years I was spoiled in that I had only one camera a Sony HDR-CX550V. When the files were imported with the Sony Picture Motion Browser utility, they were all given a very specific date/time based name, for example:

20130317145649.mt2s . That file was recorded on March 17, 2013, at 14:56:49. Cool, eh? The utility would also concatenate any files that were larger than 4 GB – no need to use copy source1 + source2 destination /b . The copy thing is the only way to stitch together multiple files with ZERO dropout in the audio, important for my symphony recordings.

( COPY [/D] [/V] [/N] [/Y | /-Y] [/Z] [/L] [/A | /B ] source [/A | /B] [+ source [/A | /B] [+ …]] [destination [/A | /B]] )

Now that I also have a Panny GH3, I would be in the same boat as you, even though I do a pretty good job of organizing by folders and having obsessive multiple backups (including off-site BD-R’s)

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8

[Dave Haynie]

[Stephen Crye] “For years I was spoiled in that I had only one camera a Sony HDR-CX550V. When the files were imported with the Sony Picture Motion Browser utility, they were all given a very specific date/time based name, for example:”

Yeah, that’s a really good point. When I used to use DV and HDV, the capture tools always gave me files with the date and time encoded in the file name. They were getting that from the metadata in the video. HDV of course uses MPEG-2 to store video and MPEG-2 Transport Streams to transport it. Curiously, AVCHD also uses MPEG-2 Transport Streams.

Not that I’ve tried this, but I’ll bet that, if you had the camcorder date set properly, you’ll have at least some files with time/date metadata. And going back some years (or maybe still, I didn’t catch the gear in question), pretty much for certain, at least back until the days of analog capture.

I did a 30 second Google search and found this:
https://www.dvmp.co.uk/

This does a bunch of stuff, but claims to be able to add time/date from metadata to your file. They offer a demo version. Again, not something I’m endorsing, and there may be other tools that do the same thing, but it’s worth a shot.

-Dave