Help my budding filmmaker recover deleted videos
August 13, 2023 8:23 AM   Subscribe

My middle-schooler is beside themselves after accidentally deleting a series of iPad videos they shot over a period of months. The videos, deleted two days ago, do not appear in the iPad 6's Recently Deleted folder, nor were they uploaded to the family iCloud account. I have basic tech skills and Google is full of dodgy-looking third-party tools –– turning to the hivemind in the hopes for a solution. Thanks in advance––
posted by reclusive_thousandaire to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
Have you looked at the Hidden album?
posted by beagle at 9:50 AM on August 13, 2023


Response by poster: Yes, sorry, I neglected to mention that. No dice, nothing in there, but thank you.
posted by reclusive_thousandaire at 10:29 AM on August 13, 2023


If you are willing to spend some money, Google "digital forensics" for your area. If there's nobody local check out national vendors who do this, such as. If anybody can help, they can. Don't try anything yourself or you could make it forever irretrievable.
posted by beagle at 1:03 PM on August 13, 2023


Not to downplay the loss of your kid's project files, but sometimes it takes a big hurt like this to underscore the importance of frequent, verified backups. Whether that means making sure it's being backed up to the cloud, or to a USB drive, or a NAS, or whatever. It's small consolation when so much work is lost, but sometimes that's what drives the point home: If it's not reliably backed up, assume it doesn't exist.

Did you check iCloud by also logging in to icloud.com via a web browser, to see if it's there? Assuming they're using iMovie, do you have any other Apple devices on the same iCloud account, maybe an iMac or a MacBook, that you can check, even if it's a long shot, and see if the files got mirrored to that device?

I hope you're able to recover the files. :(
posted by xedrik at 1:49 PM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]


What happened two days ago?

When you connect an iPad or iPhone to a Mac, you are given the option to Import the pictures and videos into the Photos app.

During the import, there's a checkbox which says "delete items after importing".

If you check that option, the videos would be located inside Photos.app on that computer, would not be on the iPad any longer, and would not show as "recently deleted" on the iPad.

This sounds a bit similar to what you are experiencing.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 3:02 PM on August 13, 2023


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