[FFmpeg-user] how to restore a video file I just overwrote?

[Dave Rice]

Hi Berteh,

On May 9, 2012, at 11:46 AM, B Berteh wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I made the big mistake of forgetting the "-i" in the next command and validated the "overwrite?" warning a bit to quickly.
> ffmpeg -i V_0003.MP4 -ss 0:00:41 -t 0:01:00 short.mp4
> 
> It obviously replaced my very important V_0003.MP4 video, for which I have no backup, with a useless 0kb video file with the same name. Stupid of me but, sure.
> 
> Is there any way I can find this video back? It's located on an external USB (NTFS) drive, It's quite big (1.1Gb). I made no write to the drive after my mistake. Undelete did (obviously) not find the file as it had not been deleted... but most of its content should still be there (unless maybe the header... but even then, who am I to know). It should even be located quite straigtforwardly as this disk is mostly used for external backup purposes (not many delete operations)

I'd recommend looking at photorec or (if not that) testdisk at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec. Photorec supports MP4 containers. Be sure to prevent any further write actions to the drive while you work on the recovery.
Dave Rice