Whether you’re a professional videographer or just using your camera or phone to record a fascinating moment, you probably use an SD card to save most of your video files. SD cards are easy to use, extremely compact, and quite affordable storage solutions for saving your media files. Thanks to their simplicity, they are considered the best friend of professional videographers, vloggers, or smartphone video-capturing enthusiasts. But there is always a chance that things will go wrong, and you may lose your video files from the same SD cards you trusted so much. Therefore, in this article, we will show you how to recover videos deleted from an SD card and take proper precautions.
Let’s dive in.
Reasons You Can Lose Videos from Your SD Card
We know you’re looking for a way to recover videos deleted from your SD card as soon as possible. But before we demonstrate that, you need to understand the reason you lost your video files. That way, you can prevent yourself from repeating the same mistakes and keep your SD card safe.
Physical Damage
Just like most electronic devices, your SD card might suffer from physical damage if you don’t handle it carefully. If you drop your SD cards multiple times or don’t handle them properly, their internal circuits may accumulate damage over time. If this keeps going on over a long period, those SD cards might lose their reading or writing functions. As a result, you might lose the video files stored in them.
Improper Removal From a Device
You should always use the eject function of your computer or phone first before physically removing the SD card. In most cases, external storage devices such as SD cards could be in a state of reading or writing a file. The eject function ensures the process of reading or writing files on the external storage has been stopped before you pull the external drive out. Otherwise, the files in your SD card might get corrupted, which is as bad as erasing the files.
Corruption of Files
The video files in your SD card might get corrupted for multiple reasons. The files may become corrupt because of malware or virus. The files can also get corrupted for issues related to the SD card’s function. The corruption of files may hit you at random, but whenever it happens, it will make the files unusable and unrecognizable.
Formatting the SD Card
When you format your SD card, all its contents, including video files, will be erased. Therefore, if you don’t want to lose your important video files, delete the files on your SD card selectively instead of outright formatting them. This might take a little longer. But it will save you from a lot of regrets and headaches in the future.
Accidental Deletion of Files
We’re humans, and it’s natural to make mistakes. To be frank, one of the biggest reasons we lose data from SD cards is accidental file deletion. It might happen when you were selectively deleting a large number of files at once. Additionally, you might’ve been unaware an important file was stored in the SD card, and you ended up formatting it.
How to Recover Deleted Videos from SD Card on Windows 10?
It’s quite troublesome when you lose important video files from your SD card. But don’t worry. You can easily recover deleted videos from an SD card using professional data recovery software from a reputed company.
With that said, before we start, download professional data recovery software on your Windows 10 device. Since most professional data restoration applications have a similar recovery process and UI (User Interface), you can use the steps below to recover your removed video files:
- First, launch the data recovery application on your Windows 10 PC.
- Next, connect the SD card to your computer. You can do that either by inserting the SD card into your computer’s built-in SD card reader, or use an external SD card reader to do the job.
- Once you connect the SD card to your computer, it will show up in the user interface of the software for data recovery. Click on the “SD Card” and then the “Scan” option to start the scanning process.
- After the scan ends, the software will show all the files that you can recover from the SD card. Find the video files you’re looking for, select them, and click on the “Recover” option.
- Next, the software will ask you to specify the location you want to restore the file to. Select a drive or folder of your choice and click on the “OK/Save” button.
Congratulations! You have successfully recovered deleted video files from your SD card and saved them on your Windows 10 machine.
How to Recover Videos Deleted from an SD Card on Mac?
Do you have a Mac computer instead of a Windows 10/11 PC? No problem. You can still use a professional data recovery software of your choice from a renowned company and retrieve videos deleted from an SD card. The process and steps might be a bit different, but they’re still similar enough to the recovery process on a Windows computer.
Again, before we start the recovery process, you need to download the software for data restoration to your Mac computer. Once that’s done, follow these steps to recover removed files from your SD card:
- First, connect the SD card to your Mac computer. Nowadays, new Mac models don’t come with an in-built SD card reader. Therefore, you can use an external SD card reader to connect the SD card to the Mac. After that, launch the data recovery software.
- Once you open the application, you will see the drives, folders, and external storage devices connected to your device. Find your SD card’s name and click on the “Scan/Recover” button to start the scanning process.
- After it scans your entire SD card, it will show the recoverable files. Skim through the files and find the ones you want to recover.
- Once you find the video files, select them by clicking on the files or the related checkboxes. After that, click on the “Recover” button.
- Next, choose the location you want to store your recovered file. Once you do it, the files will be saved in the selected location of your Mac machine.
Restore Erased Videos from an SD Card on Android Phones
Most Android phones have an option to expand the storage space using external storage cards, such as SD cards and microSD cards. A lot of Android users indeed use microSD cards to extend their phone’s storage space and keep important files in it. Thus, if you have accidentally deleted video files from the microSD card of your phone, don’t worry. You can easily recover the removed video files via professional Android data recovery apps if you act fast enough.
Note. Make sure the application for data recovery you download comes from a reliable company. Also, if you want to recover video files using the Android data recovery app, you must have root access activated on your phone. If you don’t, the app’s function will be limited, and you can only recover photo files and certain thumbnails. The simplest way to root your Android device can be found on the XDA Developers Root page.
Steps required for data rescue on an Android phone
Once you download and install the aforementioned app and root your device, follow these simple steps to retrieve videos deleted from the SD card:
- Launch the app on your Android phone and click on the “Scan” option of the app.
Note. Before the scan starts, the app will ask for permission to access your storage. Once you give it permission, it will start scanning. - Once the scan is complete, the app will show a list of recoverable files. Review the available files and tap on the files you want to recover to select them.
- After that, tap on the “Recover” button. The app will ask you to select a location to restore the video files. We recommend you store the files in a cloud-based platform, such as Google Drive, to keep them secure. You can also save them on your phone and upload them to the cloud later.
Alternative method
You can also download a professional third-party data recovery application to your computer and connect your phone to your computer to restore the videos deleted from the SD card. Necessary steps can be found under method 3 of our guide on restoring contacts in Redmi. You can use this on an Android phone of any manufacturer brand. Just make sure to check the “Videos” option instead of the “Contacts” option in the 5th step.
Recovering Lost Videos from a Physically Damaged SD Card
Did you accidentally bend or break your SD card? Did your SD card suffer from other forms of physical damage? If your answer is yes to both, you cannot get your video files back using consumer-grade software for data rescue. In fact, unless you’re a certified data recovery expert and have the right equipment, it’s almost impossible to recover data from a physically damaged SD card.
Therefore, if you have an SD card with physical damage, and you want to regain its content, your best bet is to contact a professional data retrieval service. Professional data recovery companies will be able to extract most of your important video files with an average success rate of 95% or higher.
However, the cost is not cheap. Quite the opposite—most basic data recovery services are priced between $100 and $700. Before you contact a data recovery company to recover videos from your damaged SD card(s), you need to make sure that the data is important enough to be worth the cost.
Tips to Keep Your Files Safe
SD cards are one of the best ways to store your data and important media files. But that doesn’t mean they are 100% safe. Your SD card can still suffer from physical damage or file corruption, and it can happen in a moment of carelessness. Therefore, make sure you take good care of your SD cards and follow these instructions to keep your data safe.
Backup Important Files
While an SD card is one of the most secure storage devices for media files, you should always keep one or more backups of your important files stored in other storage mediums. Cloud is one of the best places to keep your media files safe other than the SD cards. Just make a copy of your critical files and upload them to a cloud-based storage service, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud. You can also keep a copy of the video files in your computer’s internal storage or an external disk drive to keep them safe.
Don’t Remove the SD Card from Your Computer without Ejecting It
No matter how much hurry you’re in, never remove the SD card from your computer or the external SD card reader before ejecting it. Just right-click on the drive option for your SD card in the “My PC” or “Computer” (for Mac) window and click on Eject. Once you’re done, you can remove your SD card without any issue. Remember, removing your SD card from your computer without performing ejection may lead to the corruption of the files stored on it.
Store Your SD Card in An Appropriate Manner
You should always handle your SD card gently to make sure it doesn’t suffer from physical damage. In fact, mishandling SD cards is one of the biggest reasons it suffers from physical damage and people lose their important files in the process.
Moreover, you should store your SD cards in a safe and secure location. You need to ensure your SD cards don’t come in direct contact with sunlight or heat. Additionally, you should also not expose it to a humid environment. If you have multiple SD cards, you need to keep them separate and neatly organized. This way, you can keep your SD cards from being physically damaged and minimize the chances of losing important video files.
Conclusion
It can surely be devastating to lose an important media file you worked so hard to produce. Unfortunately, it can happen to anyone, including you. Thankfully, you can easily get the videos deleted from SD cards back using renowned software for the recovery of data. It’s also a good practice to take precautions and backup indispensable files in multiple locations. This way, you can avoid the anxiety of losing your data permanently, even if your SD cards fail you.
