Companies that promise something they cannot provide

I am not going to name names, but recently I have several reports from my satisfied customers moaning about other companies who have taken their money for software that cannot do what they say.  The main focus is on recovery of video deleted from the camera memory chip.

As I have written here several times, when video is recorded in the camera, the physical sequence of data is different to the logical sequence, the video is written in fragments, but the FAT keeps track of the logical order.  When the file is deleted, this sequence is also lost.  Recovery is complex and cannot be done by simple data carving.

If a video is written to a hard drive, it will normally be sequential and thus a data carving approach to recovery will often work.  I believe that software companies just test hard disk deletions and say it will work.  I have tried a few demo products with my 'favourite' GoPro camera images.  They fall flat on their face.  The software will report files, that look the correct size, but will never ever be viewable.

From CnW Recovery point of view, I have an uphill struggle (on a low budget) to let potentials users know that there is a product that will have a very high success rate of recovery of MP4, MOV, AVI, MTS videos that have been deleted from the camera memory chip.

It is a shame that the internet has to boast and boast even when something does not work.  At CnW, not everything works, but there is always free backup to resolve the problem - fairly quickly.

GoPro Hero 3 recovery of deleted files

I have often said of data structures, 'if it can be done, it will be done'.  ie almost anything is possible, and so expect many variations.  In the words of the 'Hitch Hikers Guide to the Universe' - Expect the unexpected.

A recent view of a GoPro Hero 3 camera confirmed the above.  As I have written in the past, video camera often record the data not in a different physical to logical sequence.  The slight of hand is that the FAT defines the logical sequence.  Thus many camera record the video data physically earlier than the file start sector.  On the GoPro Hero 3 camera another twist has been discovered.  Two video streams can be recorded at the same time - a high resolution, and a smaller low resolution.  The physical sequence on the disk could be as below



Just to complicate the above, there can also be jpeg thumbnails, and text status files inserted in the above stream.  Standard data carving is totally useless as nothing is in sequence.

The CnW MP4/3GP Wizard works hard, but will recover, with a high success rate videos that have been deleted.  www.cnwrecovery.com/html/mp4_wizard.html