My neighbor just did the exact same thing.
The way FAT filesystems work is they change the first byte of the filename to an invalid character to make them a tombstone.
Since he hadn't used the SD card yet, we were able to restore the files with "TestDisk", a companion tool that ships with PhotoRec. Under "Advanced" there is an "Undelete" tool. This will let you browse the filesystem, find your missing files, and copy them to another drive.
For those old enough to remember, MSDOS came with undelete.exe which worked the same way.
Disk Drill saved me last year when file corruption hit one of my SDs.
I also have a policy where I don’t delete the files on the SD card until the very last moment when new files need to be written again. This gives me a window of time in which there is an extra backup in case of issues with replication from my initial local storage on my computer, to an external drive, to the RAID array, or to the cloud.
rm -rf after the initial copy from the SD card onto the computer is a bad idea, especially if the card isn’t immediately needed for new footage.
Oof, so free software didn’t do the job despite a ton of effort and leveraging a boatload of past experience, and the paid software gave a misleading impression of success before accepting Jeff’s money, only for the actual fix to be buried in a submenu somewhere.
I had never seen Jeff's posts pop up on HN prior to this year and only learned of him via YouTube r/homelab content. Scrolling through the hn search his domain has had plenty of posts over the years, but his content has now become stickier and/or the audience has changed?
Search his blog for his views on abortion, contraception, women, and gay people. You don't even need to look at archived versions. He keeps that shit up.
He's a freaky little neo-nazi religious nut who views women as owned by the man of the house and hates gays.
But he plays "normal guy" or "quirky nerd" on youtube.
He's a former minister who graduated college in Bible studies. As unpalatable it might be to you, his views are perfectly in line with a strong christian believer from the midwest. So I don't really see a need to bring that up when we're discussing his technical videos. It's not like he lectures you about abortion at the end of a raspberry pi video...
I disagree. Someone with these views on humanity should not have a platform. They should be shamed and shunned. They should not be an "influencer" (however minor).
Look, I grew up in a cult too (the Baptist flavor). I also grew out of it mostly unscathed. He's a grown-ass man that still believes these truly heinous things. He has not grown as person. Or addressed his ignorance. And he's never retracted or apologized for his hateful views.
Which... it's his right. He can be an asshole. But people should be informed and, like I said, he should be shunned and shamed.
Woah I had no idea he was such a nut job. I really enjoyed his YouTube content but after going through his blogs I have to reconsider his position in my "for fun" content consumption.
He shares the title of "SBC Guy" with ExplainingComputers. Any time a new single-board computer comes out, especially a Raspberry Pi, they make videos with benchmarks etc. etc.
He's definitely got brand recognition. He's THE guy for Raspberry Pi and SBC stuff. I'd suspect more people would recognise him then Ebon Upton nowadays. Not ignoring the other stuff he's done, but anyone into Pi/SBC will know him.
Honourable mentions to ExplainingComputers and "Platima Tinkers".
Fairly unsatisfying conclusion. I’d be interested in knowing what that proprietary program does, how it works so well, how Sony stores video files, etc.
I think the key point is that cameras don't write the video files in one long contiguous block on disk. They internally split it up and write in an interleaved fashion. It even mentions low-level tricks like manipulating the FAT table so the moov atom which is written last appears at the beginning of the file.
I've found when you have a file with stops and starts, it's because the extraction process is not familiar with how the data is laid down on the storage media. So it sees 'I have a file'...and if it's better it sees 'the name of the file is here' and then 'it's this big' and then 'here's the linked list of clusters for that file'....or it starts at the first cluster and gets as far as it can before it runs off the tracks.
Lucky for him it was a Sony. Thanks to Android 10 and file encryption on every file, it is now impossible to restore deleted videos/pictures/files on any Android device:
Considering the amount of personal data on people’s phones, plus how commonly people lose them in public, I would say that encryption by default is unambiguously a good thing, and it’s incredible that it took Google until Android 10.
My advice is to have "some fair number" of SD cards and when you are done with the card in the camera, put it aside and install another card that hasn't been used in awhile.
Because managing files is not only error prone, deleting files should be avoided to the extent your budget allows...
...and if you are shooting still (and not video) there's really no good reason to ever delete an image off an SD card because SD cards are cheap (because photos don't require highest speed cards). SD cards can be used as "film" in a digital camera.
Apple was killing it with iPhoto/Photos for this use case until a few years ago. Put in a memory card and Photos would import new photos, offer to delete after import, and ignore photos still on the card. Photo Stream made it possible to have a minimal set of photos in the cloud to have on other devices, which could be configured to sync various albums.
Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.
> Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.
I don’t understand that. If you use iCloud, the cloud is primary storage, and your disk caches recently accessed cloud data.
So, just keep everything in a single library, and if your disk fills up iCloud will remove pictures you haven’t accessed recently from your disk.
> because photos don't require highest speed cards
That hypothesis is certainly getting tested these days in specific niches. With high megapixel sensors, pre-capture, and cameras capable of pushing between 30fps and 120fps worth of compressed raws or high quality JPEGs, you can obliterate your camera's write buffer and CFExpress write bandwidth. You can make many bad photos of an animal, bird, or athlete with extreme ease -- and hopefully find that one winner in the haystack.
I would say the line between movies and photos is getting blurred, but it's unlikely you're using a shutter speed that allows for motion blur with these bursts of photos!
>and if you are shooting still (and not video) there's really no good reason to ever delete an image off an SD card
There are tons of good reasons.
When downloading images off the card, software has to read all the files on it - which can take a very long time if the card is full of photos you've already processed in a previous session.
Then there's that you shouldn't be keeping most of the shots you take. Unless you're a still life artiste, most people (including professionals) take multiple pictures to account for blinking, moving objects, slightly different angles, etc. You should keep the best shots and delete the rest - storage is cheap but having to go back through all the garbage to find the good shots in the future is pointless.
Modern cameras have large sensors that produce large files. It's wasteful to keep buying more and more SSD cards. Just build a NAS or pay for cloud storage.
> My advice is to have "some fair number" of SD cards and when you are done with the card in the camera, put it aside and install another card that hasn't been used in aw
Yeah, a kind of rotating workflow seems necessary when you doing professional camera stuff.
Of course, something like this can always happen; however, it's just as likely that an SD card will fail at some point.
The camera should record redundantly, and many semi-pro cameras already do this if you want them to. Then you can leave the second card untouched and have a spare one and rotate only the spares.
Even if I didn't do something that demands fast cards and fills them up quickly, I don't see much reason to keep photos on SD cards rather than my laptop's SSD with an external HDD as backup. I import and cull the photos, run a backup, and reformat the cards.
Except unpowered SD cards (and SSDs for that matter) don't claim to hold data for more than a couple of years.
I'm a big believer in thinking you have backups being worse than knowing you don't, so anything that encourages people to believe $(flash memory) is suitable as long-term cold storage is actually, really bad.
I agree there's no need to copy & wipe cards immediately, but treating them as "film" is inherently flawed and setting yourself up for failure. The amount of people that turn up in data recovery forums unable to access old, important, "backed up" (memory card/ssd on a shelf) photos is depressingly high.
My neighbor just did the exact same thing. The way FAT filesystems work is they change the first byte of the filename to an invalid character to make them a tombstone.
Since he hadn't used the SD card yet, we were able to restore the files with "TestDisk", a companion tool that ships with PhotoRec. Under "Advanced" there is an "Undelete" tool. This will let you browse the filesystem, find your missing files, and copy them to another drive.
For those old enough to remember, MSDOS came with undelete.exe which worked the same way.
Disk Drill saved me last year when file corruption hit one of my SDs.
I also have a policy where I don’t delete the files on the SD card until the very last moment when new files need to be written again. This gives me a window of time in which there is an extra backup in case of issues with replication from my initial local storage on my computer, to an external drive, to the RAID array, or to the cloud.
rm -rf after the initial copy from the SD card onto the computer is a bad idea, especially if the card isn’t immediately needed for new footage.
Oof, so free software didn’t do the job despite a ton of effort and leveraging a boatload of past experience, and the paid software gave a misleading impression of success before accepting Jeff’s money, only for the actual fix to be buried in a submenu somewhere.
My inner product manager is screaming.
I had never seen Jeff's posts pop up on HN prior to this year and only learned of him via YouTube r/homelab content. Scrolling through the hn search his domain has had plenty of posts over the years, but his content has now become stickier and/or the audience has changed?
Search his blog for his views on abortion, contraception, women, and gay people. You don't even need to look at archived versions. He keeps that shit up.
He's a freaky little neo-nazi religious nut who views women as owned by the man of the house and hates gays.
But he plays "normal guy" or "quirky nerd" on youtube.
He's a former minister who graduated college in Bible studies. As unpalatable it might be to you, his views are perfectly in line with a strong christian believer from the midwest. So I don't really see a need to bring that up when we're discussing his technical videos. It's not like he lectures you about abortion at the end of a raspberry pi video...
I disagree. Someone with these views on humanity should not have a platform. They should be shamed and shunned. They should not be an "influencer" (however minor).
Look, I grew up in a cult too (the Baptist flavor). I also grew out of it mostly unscathed. He's a grown-ass man that still believes these truly heinous things. He has not grown as person. Or addressed his ignorance. And he's never retracted or apologized for his hateful views.
Which... it's his right. He can be an asshole. But people should be informed and, like I said, he should be shunned and shamed.
Please... no one should be shunned and shamed for their worldview.
As wrong as they may be, shunning and shaming are also wrong-headed (in my worldview).
Woah I had no idea he was such a nut job. I really enjoyed his YouTube content but after going through his blogs I have to reconsider his position in my "for fun" content consumption.
Fascinating comments here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2012/changes-nothing-contr...
He shares the title of "SBC Guy" with ExplainingComputers. Any time a new single-board computer comes out, especially a Raspberry Pi, they make videos with benchmarks etc. etc.
I took too long to write my comment, you beat me to the punch. I didn't plagiarise your comment, but I do largely agree!
He's definitely got brand recognition. He's THE guy for Raspberry Pi and SBC stuff. I'd suspect more people would recognise him then Ebon Upton nowadays. Not ignoring the other stuff he's done, but anyone into Pi/SBC will know him.
Honourable mentions to ExplainingComputers and "Platima Tinkers".
Fairly unsatisfying conclusion. I’d be interested in knowing what that proprietary program does, how it works so well, how Sony stores video files, etc.
The proprietary program has this blog post: https://www.cleverfiles.com/help/advanced-camera-recovery-in...
I think the key point is that cameras don't write the video files in one long contiguous block on disk. They internally split it up and write in an interleaved fashion. It even mentions low-level tricks like manipulating the FAT table so the moov atom which is written last appears at the beginning of the file.
I've found when you have a file with stops and starts, it's because the extraction process is not familiar with how the data is laid down on the storage media. So it sees 'I have a file'...and if it's better it sees 'the name of the file is here' and then 'it's this big' and then 'here's the linked list of clusters for that file'....or it starts at the first cluster and gets as far as it can before it runs off the tracks.
I think the main problem here was that there wasn't a single script that:
1. Accepts no parameters.
2. Looks for an SD card with a bunch of Sony-structured folders.
3. Copies the media from that to the NAS folder directly and fsyncs.
4. Checks that the files are there and look ok.
5. Maybe triggers a ZFS snapshot? Why not.
6. Only then deletes the files from the source.
Lucky for him it was a Sony. Thanks to Android 10 and file encryption on every file, it is now impossible to restore deleted videos/pictures/files on any Android device:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/264642/are-andr...
Considering the amount of personal data on people’s phones, plus how commonly people lose them in public, I would say that encryption by default is unambiguously a good thing, and it’s incredible that it took Google until Android 10.
Encryption by default doesn’t require disabling undelete.
My advice is to have "some fair number" of SD cards and when you are done with the card in the camera, put it aside and install another card that hasn't been used in awhile.
Because managing files is not only error prone, deleting files should be avoided to the extent your budget allows...
...and if you are shooting still (and not video) there's really no good reason to ever delete an image off an SD card because SD cards are cheap (because photos don't require highest speed cards). SD cards can be used as "film" in a digital camera.
Apple was killing it with iPhoto/Photos for this use case until a few years ago. Put in a memory card and Photos would import new photos, offer to delete after import, and ignore photos still on the card. Photo Stream made it possible to have a minimal set of photos in the cloud to have on other devices, which could be configured to sync various albums.
Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.
> Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.
I don’t understand that. If you use iCloud, the cloud is primary storage, and your disk caches recently accessed cloud data.
So, just keep everything in a single library, and if your disk fills up iCloud will remove pictures you haven’t accessed recently from your disk.
Some people don’t want to see all their bad shots when scrolling through their library, but they do want to keep them.
> because photos don't require highest speed cards
That hypothesis is certainly getting tested these days in specific niches. With high megapixel sensors, pre-capture, and cameras capable of pushing between 30fps and 120fps worth of compressed raws or high quality JPEGs, you can obliterate your camera's write buffer and CFExpress write bandwidth. You can make many bad photos of an animal, bird, or athlete with extreme ease -- and hopefully find that one winner in the haystack.
I would say the line between movies and photos is getting blurred, but it's unlikely you're using a shutter speed that allows for motion blur with these bursts of photos!
>and if you are shooting still (and not video) there's really no good reason to ever delete an image off an SD card
There are tons of good reasons.
When downloading images off the card, software has to read all the files on it - which can take a very long time if the card is full of photos you've already processed in a previous session.
Then there's that you shouldn't be keeping most of the shots you take. Unless you're a still life artiste, most people (including professionals) take multiple pictures to account for blinking, moving objects, slightly different angles, etc. You should keep the best shots and delete the rest - storage is cheap but having to go back through all the garbage to find the good shots in the future is pointless.
Modern cameras have large sensors that produce large files. It's wasteful to keep buying more and more SSD cards. Just build a NAS or pay for cloud storage.
Nothing worse than getting footage ingest underway and discovering the card has all kinds of stuff on it already that you now need to audit
> My advice is to have "some fair number" of SD cards and when you are done with the card in the camera, put it aside and install another card that hasn't been used in aw
Yeah, a kind of rotating workflow seems necessary when you doing professional camera stuff.
Of course, something like this can always happen; however, it's just as likely that an SD card will fail at some point.
The camera should record redundantly, and many semi-pro cameras already do this if you want them to. Then you can leave the second card untouched and have a spare one and rotate only the spares.
Yeah, after working through this blog post, I ordered 6 more cards, so I can have a queue and not delete footage until project completion!
> photos don't require highest speed cards
I photograph birds in flight at 25 or 50 FPS.
Even if I didn't do something that demands fast cards and fills them up quickly, I don't see much reason to keep photos on SD cards rather than my laptop's SSD with an external HDD as backup. I import and cull the photos, run a backup, and reformat the cards.
My advice is to run a script that automatically copies the files to the right place rather than hope you have the right window open at the time.
Except unpowered SD cards (and SSDs for that matter) don't claim to hold data for more than a couple of years.
I'm a big believer in thinking you have backups being worse than knowing you don't, so anything that encourages people to believe $(flash memory) is suitable as long-term cold storage is actually, really bad.
I agree there's no need to copy & wipe cards immediately, but treating them as "film" is inherently flawed and setting yourself up for failure. The amount of people that turn up in data recovery forums unable to access old, important, "backed up" (memory card/ssd on a shelf) photos is depressingly high.
Camera makers: please just use Android and allow us to sync photos automatically.
There were cameras with FTP or WebDAV support, when connected to WiFi. I guess it’s just not really popular?
You don't need Android for that (thank god).
How would you upload to Immich?
Using their extensively documented restful API is the most obvious option to me: https://api.immich.app/endpoints
Honestly hat read for me as "Disk Drill" ad.