Can an erased XD Cam disc be restored?

Hello,

I accidently erased an XD Cam disc when using the Sony XD Cam Transfer software in FCP. Is there anything I can do to restore the lost data on the disc?

Marco

There is an unformat option in the cameras, buried in a maintenance menu somewhere. Thankfully, I've never had to use it.

From what I understand, its success depends somewhat on what firmware the deck/camera that recorded it had, what firmware the current deck/camera being used to undelete/unformat has, as well as things like how full the disk was, and whether you've recorded anything new on it.

When we first took delivery of the SD XDCams, we had an incident in which a mislabeled disk was formatted and used again. When the error was detected, Sony was contacted and we FedEx'd the disk somewhere (Japan?) and large parts of the deleted interview were salvaged.

I suspect Andy Mees will know more, and he'll be along shortly. ;-)

Hehe ... not this time Mike. (Sorry Marco).
Thank goodness I've never needed such an option so far, and here's hoping it stays that way!

I certainly didn't know there was any kind of specific unformat option built in, but I'm gonna take a look for it now ... so far I can say that it definitely doesn't exist on the F70 (at least not the one I have here). I'll check an F75 and a F350 in due course and see what's to see.

FWIW, unformat option or otherwise, it stands to reason that XDCAM media should recoverable in just the same manner as any media is scavengable to some extent.

Thanks for the ideas guys!

Let me explain what happened: I was using the Sony XD Transfer application, and everytime a disc was transferred and ejected from the player, the image remained visible in the application. After 8 discs or so I thought: why not remove the images because I don't need them anymore.

So I selected all images and deleted them. However the disc in my player (not protected...) was erased in that action. I just thought the images would disappear. Yeah, not too smart I know. :-)

Thanks anyway for the suggestions.

Marco

I didn't know that was possible.

Did you get your data back?

Me neither.
Fortunately it appreared that the disc only contained 'extra' clips... phew... but lesson learned!

Marco