Consumer-oriented video cameras and recorders underwent many iterations and upgrades before reaching their current, streamlined design. It wasn’t long ago when personal camcorders used many different forms of media – most of which involved some form of tape. Not only did this make it difficult to purchase the right hardware, but it also made data recovery a pain.
Most current-gen video recorders – including smartphones, digital cameras and standalone devices – use SD flash to save and store video. It’s a marked improvement from tape in many ways – and it also introduced some amount of standardization into the process of recovering data from a video recorder.
There are many apps and utilities that advertise the ability to restore files from SD memory cards, but many of these programs are malware or spyware in disguise. The few that are trustworthy are expensive and often overly complicated.
Introducing R-Undelete
R-Undelete – from the R-Tools family of software solutions – is a simple and affordable program for recovering lost video files. To begin the process, start by creating an image of the affected SD card. It’s much easier to work with an image rather than the physical card itself, and this preserves the integrity of the card if something should go wrong during the recovery process.
Next, choose the file types you want to search for. To narrow down your search to video files, click the “Clear All” button to remove any selected items and manual click the box next to “Multimedia Video.” Conversely, you can expand your search – and possible recover files of other types – by clicking their respective boxes.
Once you’ve created a compressed image, you can start the scan process. Note that R-Undelete automatically performs a deep analysis of the card while it’s creating the initial image – this speeds up the process and facilitates the entire recovery process.
Finally, load your image file – along with the scan info – into R-Undelete. Once loaded, you can choose to view a detailed scan analysis or move forward with the data recovery process. R-Undelete will give you a list of all recoverable files – in a familiar Explorer-style window – and let you choose which ones to recover. You can also “Select All” to recover all available files within the image.
Depending on the exact type of data loss or corruption, you might have to take advantage of R-Undelete’s advanced features. Data that has been deleted directly from the video recorder itself, for example, is treated differently than data that is lost or corrupted by other means. R-Undelete is capable of video recovery on files that have been lost in many different ways.
Using R-Undelete to Recover Your Lost Video Files
Whether you’ve lost data to an accidental file deletion, damaged hardware or a formatted or corrupt SD memory card, R-Tools and R-Undelete is a handy little utility that simplifies the process of data recovery. Although its primary purpose is to recover lost video files from SD memory cards and their disk images, the tool actually supports many different file types – including pictures, audio files and more.
