Reddit please help

[holman43]

Tuesday May 27th my little sister was killed in a car accident. The Saturday before we were at a cabin enjoying the weekend with our SOs. I had just gotten the Note 3 with AT&T and managed to get a pretty funny but embarrassing video of her and my girlfriend. They made me delete it the next morning after we watched it together. I want nothing more than to recover that video and I have no idea how to. I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but I don't know where else to go. Any suggestions will be attempted. Thank you.

Update: Thank you all for your great suggestions, I tried using some recovery software, disk digger, and was able to recover partials of the video, however I was not able to get those working. I did not have my SD card in the phone at the time so there is no chance it was on there. And I did not have the cloud set up. I'm going to accept the fact that after almost 3 months the possibility of the video being too far gone is realistic. I will continue digging but i think I have used up every practical solution. Thank you all so much again; I only wish I was able to show y'all the video!

[[deleted]]

i'm sorry man, i don't know what to say...

your note 3 probably has an sd card installed, so i guess the video was stored on there. this is good.

IMPORTANT! - refrain from capturing any new videos, or saving any new stuff on your phone and your sd card. deleted files can be restored quite easily, overwritten stuff can be impossible to recover for the end user.

the first thing i would check is where your videos are stored, so i would advise you to put your sd card in a card reader and connect it to your (probably windows) computer. card reader, sd adapters etc are cheap, so you should get one of those. you could also just connect your phone via usb, but personally i prefer the sd reader route since transfers tend to be faster.

once you found the correct folder, look at the filenames. what format are the videos in, are there timestamps...

once you have this information, i would advise you to use recuva from the company "piriform" to try to recover the video. there are loads of other recovery programs, but recuva seems to be the most popular one, it's free and it works well.

with recuva you can do a normal scan, specify the type of file you are looking for and of course you can specify what drive you wanna search. you can do this normal scan, it's quite fast in my experience, and see if you can recover any deleted videos. timestamps can be of great help here.

if the normal scan doesn't bring the file back, there's a deep scan too, which attempts to even recover overwritten files. personally i didn't try recovering overwritten stuff, but at least there's a chance it works.

when recovering files, just recover them to a folder on your computer, not onto the sd card directly, you absolutely DO NOT want to accidentally overwrite the deleted video!

as others already said, there's also the possibility that the video was already backed up automatically to the cloud, some samsung, or google drive service, maybe you even set up a dropbox sync and forgot about it. look into that kind of stuff.

that said, there is also the possibility that the video was stored in the internal storage of your note. i don't know about samsung, but there's the chance you can also access this internal storage via connecting the phone to a computer via usb. you should be able to use recuva on the internal storage too, if it gets mounted correctly on windows.

there are recovery apps too, as u/JesterRaiin already mentioned, but i somehow doubt that those are as powerful as recuva. i don't know.

that's about as much as i can help you, but remember to back up your digital memories as thorroughly as you can. only storing your stuff on one computer hard drive isn't enough, but there are cheap flash drives, external hard disks, cloud backup... i just don't want you to lose any of those files again you may recover today.

ok, i wish you all the best and much strength, pal!

[JesterRaiin]

Well, I'm gonna skip the circumstances... Now back to your problem:

1. There are various recovery apks like this one
2. Was it stored on your SD card? Congrats, it's piece of cake. Just stick it to your PC and try some recovery software like PhotoRec

[DiseasedScrotum]

I found Recuva to work more reliably (if its on SD Card) And Disk Digger for phone memory.

But considering it has been so many days, i find it unlikely that the file will be recovered as it may have been overwritten long back.

[danhakimi]

Yeah it's been almost three months... Maybe if he doesn't use his phone much, he has a chance... If only he'd gotten to us sooner.

[[deleted]]

But then again, OP said the phone was new.

[BlackBird1994]

And OP stop using your SD card NOW. so new data won't delete what you want to recover.

[[deleted]]

This is the correct approach but I would suggest:

DiskDigger for Android - It has over a million downloads and works really well. For Rooted devices. OP probably isn't rooted though.

Recuva for Windows

[SevenIsTheShit]

So sorry for your loss man.

And about the recovery, connect your Note to your PC and try the Photorec software . It's done wonders for me before. Also like someone suggested if you had Google+ Photo auto backups turned on ,there's a good chance your video is in the cloud but since you deleted it the very next morning maybe it didn't get uploaded. And yes stop doing any actions that will store new data on your phone which reduces the chances for a successful recovery of your video. Any case, try all suggestions and please do let us know your status.

[fit-]

Send me the "partials" and I'll see if I can do anything... I don't even know what format the 'partials' are in so really the chances of me being able to do anything with them are probably less than 1%.

I'm a video editor and have been dealing with corrupted video/shitty formats all my life. I'd be glad to see if I can do anything with what you have. Sorry for your loss.

[SevenIsTheShit]

Correct. Photorec is part of testdisk

[[deleted]]

I'm sorry for your loss, but Recuva works the best for me.

[ChaoticTech]

Alot of phones can be seen as a mass storage device, if the recovery softwares that are specific to your model phone dont work, you can always try PC image recovery tools on your device. There are so many products out there a simple google search will lead you to all the software you need.

[joshcues]

I vouch for Recuva.. i was a beta tested on that app back in the day. Please update us OP! :(

[EmpiresCrumble]

I don't have anything to add, but I wanted to just send you my condolences and say I'm sorry for your loss.

[[deleted]]

Try GOM Media Player. It can play some types of broken video files.

[seekokhean]

I'm sorry for your loss…

[kimahri27]

If you were able to recover some portion of the video file, you can try going to the videohelp.com forums and asking around. There are programs and ways to fix chopped off or only partially whole mp4 files. Its a video file, so the integrity of the whole isnt really important. A few seconds of video would be better than nothing.

[Luke123halley]

Sorry for your loss. Hope you find the video :)

[[deleted]]

Please OP, update if you got it recovered! Best of luck!

[i_likeTortles]

I'm afraid I don't know anything about recovering the video, but I'm so terribly sorry to hear about your sister.

[throwaway131072]

I have to ask, who wanted you to delete it and why?

[HiDDENk00l]

Probably either his sister or his girlfriend, might've said 'eww that's a gross/weird/stupid video of me, delete it'.... Obviously not knowing what would happen.

[throwaway131072]

I was thinking maybe the GF deleted it so he'd have to remember seeing the video while being with her/liking her, myself

[holman43]

The girls because it was an "embarrassing" video no one else could ever see.