How to recover deleted videos from an SD card
If you deleted a video from a camera or phone SD card, or formatted the card, the footage is usually still on it. It stays there until something new is written over it. What you do in the next few minutes matters more than which tool you use.
First: stop using the card
- Take the card out of the camera, phone or drone. Don’t record, take photos or let the device create thumbnails on it.
- Don’t format it, even if Windows says “You need to format the disk before you can use it”. Click Cancel.
- Don’t run “repair” tools like CHKDSK on it. They write to the card.
- Don’t copy anything onto it, including recovered files. Recover to a different drive.
Why deleted video can still be there
When you delete a file or quick-format a card, the camera or computer only erases the card’s table of contents: the list saying which file lives where. The video data itself is left in place and marked as free space. It isn’t gone until new files happen to land on the same spot.
Formatting in a camera is almost always this kind of quick format. That’s why a card that was “formatted” yesterday and hasn’t been used since is usually very recoverable.
Why video is harder than photos
Most free recovery tools, like PhotoRec and Recuva, find lost files by looking for the few bytes every file type starts with. That works well for photos, which are small and usually stored in one piece.
Videos are big. On a card that has been used for a while, one clip is often split into pieces scattered around the card, with other files in between. A tool that finds the start of the video and just reads onward will stitch in the wrong pieces, and you get a file that won’t play or turns to grey blocks halfway through. If the start of the file was overwritten, those tools don’t see the video at all.
MP4 and MOV videos also carry an index, called the moov, usually at the end of the file. It lists exactly where every frame is. Keepsake finds that index, checks every frame against it and rebuilds the video from the pieces that are really its own. That also means it can tell you honestly how much of each video survived.
Recovering the videos with Keepsake
- Put the SD card in a card reader connected to a Windows 10 or 11 PC. Don’t use the camera’s USB cable, which can hide the card from direct reading.
- Download Keepsake and open it. Windows will ask for administrator permission, which is needed to read underneath the files and folders.
- Pick the card. It’s listed as a memory card with its name and size. Keepsake only reads from it and never writes.
- Start the scan. Videos appear as they’re found, each with a score showing how much of it is intact.
- Preview them for free. If you want to keep one, a license is $49 once, and you save it to a different drive.
If the card is failing (slow, disconnecting, making Windows hang), tick Make a safety copy first. Keepsake reads the card once into a file on another drive, then works only from that copy.
If only part of a video survived
When the end of a video was overwritten but the middle wasn’t, Keepsake shows the stretches that are still clean, with timestamps, and can export each one as a separate playable clip. A 40-second clip from the day is worth a lot more than a file that won’t open.