Video · camera and proxy media
proxy and camera-original MP4: find after an import failure
Where are missing camera originals with surviving proxies after a failed import?
Short answer
First check whether the import took only the proxies: a transfer can finish the small proxy folder while originals fail or are skipped. List proxy and original folders separately at the destination and on the card. If the originals are missing in both places, scan the card read-only.
The situation
missing camera originals with surviving proxies is incomplete at the destination and no longer appears reliably on the source.
An import that ends with a green tick may still have moved only half the material. Proxy files transfer quickly and complete first, so a destination that looks populated can hold the entire proxy folder and not a single camera original.
01 / Diagnose
Work out what actually disappeared
Ingest tools handle proxies and originals as separate jobs, and the larger job is the one that fails on a slow reader, a full disk or a card pulled early. If the tool then ran its delete-after-import step on everything it believed it had, the card lost originals that never arrived at the destination.
Move, rename, catalog and delete-after-import steps can fail at different moments and leave source and destination in different states. For proxy and camera-original MP4, this matters because small proxy files can survive in a separate folder while high-resolution originals are absent
Check the last known path, trash and backups without writing to the original device.
02 / Protect the source
Preserve the best recovery chance
- 1
Quit the ingest application before it retries, and unplug the card reader so no further copy or delete job can start.
- 2
List the destination twice, once filtered to proxy files and once to originals, and compare both counts against the shot list.
- 3
Check the trash, the temporary ingest folder and the editor media cache, then look at the card itself without writing to it.
- 4
If originals are absent everywhere, scan the card read-only and export the hits to a drive other than the import destination.
Do not reformat the card because the import reported completion, and do not point the editor at proxies as a substitute. Once the card is cleared, the only originals left are the ones the failed transfer already wrote, and those are the incomplete ones.
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 reads exFAT, NTFS and FAT16/FAT32 sources and uncompressed IMG, DD, RAW or BIN images on macOS and Windows. It cannot query an ingest tool database or recover from encrypted or Linux-formatted drives. Scanning is free; export requires the one-time 50 € license.
04 / Verify
Check the recovered content, not just its name
Every take must exist twice at the destination: a proxy and a much larger original of identical length. Open the biggest original and the last one in the sequence, since interrupted transfers fail at the end. A file whose size stops at a suspiciously round number was cut mid-copy.
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 camera and proxy media be recovered in this situation?+
An import that ends with a green tick may still have moved only half the material. Proxy files transfer quickly and complete first, so a destination that looks populated can hold the entire proxy folder and not a single camera original. The result still depends on what remains readable on the source.
What should I avoid before scanning?+
Do not reformat the card because the import reported completion, and do not point the editor at proxies as a substitute.
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?+
Every take must exist twice at the destination: a proxy and a much larger original of identical length.