I was asked to try Disk Drill 6 beta, in particular I was asked to comment on the new Action Camera Module that was specifically designed to recover video data from GoPro, DJI action cameras, but also for example ‘normal’ Sony cameras.
What’s so special about Action Cam videos? What makes them hard to recover?
The problem is that these cameras often create and write to several files simultaneously. And a consequence is that these files get fragmented almost by definition. Imagine the camera records/writes a high resolution video and lower resolution (but high enough for the little preview windows). Imagine how the buffer fills and the camera writes data to the SD Card, first high res data, then low res data, some times a preview JPEG and you can see how we end up with fragmented files.
As long as the file system is intact this is not a problem, we can just ask the OS or the camera to open a file for viewing, and the OS / camera firmware uses the file system to determine what clusters are allocated to any specific file. The problem is when we can not rely on the FAT. File recovery tools can often find the start of a file without too much trouble and will simply assume a file is contiguous. But we just saw it isn’t. And this is why we need specialized tools or modules like the one in Disk Drill to recover such data.
As you will see int the video I will specifically select the “Cameras, drones etc.” option. I can also scan the actual SD Card or logical volume on a card using the “normal” procedure, and this will detect the videos, but the recovery algorithm that’s specific for action cameras and such will not be used. And it will probably mean the videos that will be recovered won’t play correctly.
Note that I am previewing the upcoming version in the video!
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