Recover deleted MTS / AVCHD camcorder videos
Sony Handycam, Panasonic and Canon camcorders from the last fifteen years mostly record AVCHD: .MTS files on the card, .M2TS once copied to a computer. If they were deleted or the card was formatted, there’s good news. This format is one of the easier ones to bring back in full.
First steps
- Stop recording on that card or camcorder’s internal memory.
- Don’t format or “repair” the card or the camcorder’s memory.
- Take the card out and put it in a card reader. For footage in the camcorder’s built-in memory, see the note further down.
Why AVCHD recovers well
An MTS file is a transport stream: the same format TV broadcasts use. It’s built from small packets that each carry their own marker and a running clock. Unlike MP4, there’s no separate index that has to survive, so a recovered stream plays on its own, with sound.
The catch is that camcorders split long recordings into several files (often at 2 GB or 4 GB). On a card that’s been used for a while, those pieces end up scattered. A tool that just reads forward from the start of a file will stitch in the wrong pieces, and you get jumps, freezes or someone else’s birthday in the middle.
Keepsake reads the clock inside the stream. A piece that starts exactly where another left off is its continuation, so the scattered pieces go back together in the right order. That works even when the card’s file records are gone.
Recovering with Keepsake
- Put the card in a card reader on a Windows 10 or 11 PC.
- Download Keepsake, open it and allow administrator access.
- Pick the card and scan. It only reads, and never changes the card.
- Preview the recordings it finds for free. A $49 license saves the ones you want to keep, to a different drive.
Older DVD camcorders record MPEG-2 (.VOB / .MOD) instead. Keepsake recovers those too, the same way.
What can’t be recovered
Recordings made on top of the old ones replace them, and those parts are gone. Keepsake shows how much of each recording survived, and saves the parts that did.