Production · corporate video shoot cards and drives
corporate video shoot: recover after a failed drive handoff
What should I do when files disappear during the corporate video shoot handoff?
Short answer
First freeze both drives and ask who moved what: files lost between shooter and agency often sit in an unexpected folder, were renamed as duplicates or were moved instead of copied. Search both drives for the clip names. If they were deleted, File Recovery Hero scans exFAT, NTFS and FAT32 drives, not APFS or HFS+.
The situation
Media was handed to another editor or drive and is now missing from both expected locations.
Files that vanished between the shooter and the agency are almost always still somewhere. A transfer that moved instead of copied, a renamed duplicate or a destination folder nobody agreed on explains the symptom far more often than a genuine deletion does.
01 / Diagnose
Work out what actually disappeared
Corporate projects pass through several parties: production company, agency, in-house editor, sometimes a courier drive. Each handoff can drop material differently. Network transfers time out, a drag between two mounted volumes becomes a move, files land in a subfolder created automatically by the copy tool, or a second delivery with the same clip names overwrites the first one without asking.
Move operations, duplicate filenames and destination assumptions can fail between teams. For corporate video shoot, this matters because the corporate video shoot combines several sources, takes and handoff steps that must be reconciled as a set
Check the last known path, trash and backups without writing to the original device.
02 / Protect the source
Preserve the best recovery chance
- 1
Have everyone stop writing to the drives involved, then disconnect them so no sync or cleanup job runs in the background.
- 2
Reconstruct the delivery: which folder was sent, by whom, with which tool, and whether the transfer was confirmed as finished.
- 3
Search each drive for the exact clip names and for the project number, including hidden folders and the recycle bin or trash.
- 4
Where the files are unrecoverable by searching, scan the drive that held them last read-only and export results to a separate disk.
Do not repeat the delivery onto the drive that lost the files, and do not let anyone defragment, optimise or repair it first. Both write over the blocks the deleted clips still occupy, and a shared client drive is often in use by more than one person.
03 / Choose the method
Match the tool to the source
For stable, readable exFAT, NTFS and FAT16/FAT32 or uncompressed IMG, DD, RAW and BIN images.
Unconfirmed exports are marked .UNVERIFIED.
File Recovery Hero scans exFAT, NTFS and FAT16/FAT32 drives and uncompressed images on macOS and Windows; an APFS or HFS+ drive from the agency is outside that range, as is any encrypted volume. Files overwritten by the retry cannot be restored.
04 / Verify
Check the recovered content, not just its name
Compare what arrives with the delivery note: clip count per camera, byte size per file, and the audio and sidecar folders alongside the video. Open the first and last clip of each folder, and let the editor relink the project before anyone confirms the handoff as complete.
Keep the source until two verified copies exist. One working preview is not enough.
Sources and technical references
FAQ
Questions about this recovery case
Can corporate video shoot cards and drives be recovered in this situation?+
Files that vanished between the shooter and the agency are almost always still somewhere. A transfer that moved instead of copied, a renamed duplicate or a destination folder nobody agreed on explains the symptom far more often than a genuine deletion does. The result still depends on what remains readable on the source.
What should I avoid before scanning?+
Do not repeat the delivery onto the drive that lost the files, and do not let anyone defragment, optimise or repair it first.
Does scanning write to my memory card?+
Your memory card is only read. Nothing is saved to it.
How do I know whether the result is complete?+
Compare what arrives with the delivery note: clip count per camera, byte size per file, and the audio and sidecar folders alongside the video.