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Recuva or PhotoRec didn’t find your video?

You ran a recovery tool, it found hundreds of photos, and the one video you actually need is missing, or it came back and won’t play. That doesn’t always mean it’s gone. It often means the tool was looking for the wrong part of the file.

What those tools look for

There are two ways recovery tools find deleted files.

• Reading what’s left of the file system. Recuva and similar tools read the drive’s leftover table of contents. After a format, or once those records are reused, the entry for your video isn’t there any more.
• Carving by signature. PhotoRec and deep scan modes search the raw drive for the first bytes of each file type. For MP4 and MOV, that’s a block called ftyp at the very start of the file.

Both have the same weak spot. If the start of the video, or its file-system record, was overwritten, the tool has nothing to recognise. The rest of the video can be sitting on the drive completely intact, and it won’t appear in the results.

How that happens

Starts of files get overwritten more often than you’d think:

• a USB stick was turned into a Windows or Linux installer, which writes over the beginning of the drive
• a camera formatted the card and recorded a few new clips before anyone noticed
• new files were copied onto the drive after the videos were deleted

New data tends to land at the beginning of free space, and the start of each video is exactly the part those tools need.

And when a video is found but won’t play

Videos are big, so on a well-used card or stick they’re often stored in several pieces, with other files in between. Signature carving finds the start and reads onward in a straight line. It picks up the wrong pieces, and you get a file that won’t open, freezes or turns to grey blocks partway through.

Working from the other end

MP4 and MOV files keep an index, the moov, usually at the end of the file. It records the exact size and position of every frame. Keepsake searches the drive for those indexes instead of file starts. For each one it:

1. works out where the file must have started, even if that part is gone
2. checks every single frame against the index, which gives an honest “how much survived” score
3. spots where foreign data was inserted into the middle of the video and splices around it
4. rebuilds a playable file with sound, or, when only part survived, exports the clean stretches as clips

It also finds video that has no index left at all (H.264, HEVC, MPEG-4, and camcorder formats like AVCHD and DVD) by recognising the frames themselves.

Keepsake was built after exactly this situation. Two well-known tools recovered 6 videos from a USB stick. Working from the index recovered 3 more they missed entirely, plus clean clips from a fourth that had been partly overwritten.

Try it on the same drive

Scanning and previewing are free, so you can see whether Keepsake finds what the other tools missed before paying anything. Keep using the drive as little as possible until you’re done: every new file risks overwriting more.