How to Recover Lost Videos from an SD Card?

By ankita bose Updated: Jul 11, 2024, 17:17 IST

In this guide, you will learn to retrieve videos from an SD card without compromising their quality.

Vloggers, videographers, or those who often record videos often store their stuff on memory cards and other storage devices. You might have been using an SD card on your mobile for the same purpose. Aren’t you?

Since an SD card is prone to corruption, losing a video file from your card isn’t something new. There are several reasons behind this issue, as presented and discussed below. It is a common problem that millions of people face worldwide.

If you are stuck in a similar situation and want to recover video from an SD card, this is the perfect guide for you to read through.

Part 1. Possible Reasons for SD Card Data Loss

Before exploring various solutions to recover deleted videos from SD cards, let’s first look at the reasons behind this issue.

  • A corrupted SD card makes your video files inaccessible.
  • Virus infections are also the leading reason behind losing your videos from the memory card.
  • You may also lose videos from the card if formatting or accidental deletion occurs.
  • Any sort of minor or major physical damage can also be the potential cause of video loss.
  • Removing cards without safe ejection may also lead to losing your videos.

You must have heard that video files are often hard to recover compared to other forms of data. Let’s find out what makes videos hard to restore once they are deleted or lost due to any reason.

  • Videos are usually bigger in size, which is why they are hard to recover at times.
  • When video files are deleted, sometimes, they do not go to the Recycle Bin because of their bigger file size. Hence, it becomes challenging for you to retrieve them.
  • Videos are likely to reduce quality when you try to recover them.

Part 2. 5 Effective Ways to Recover Deleted Videos from SD Cards

As stated earlier, video files are often huge in size. Therefore, once they are deleted or lost, you should use a computer to restore them by connecting the SD card to the system. Before you perform an SD card recovery, don’t forget to consider a few things, as listed below.

  • Stop using the SD card immediately to avoid any sort of issue in the future.
  • Check for data backups to perform an instant recovery.
  • Check whether or not the deleted video files are in the Recycle Bin or hidden folders.

Key Methods to Recover MP4/Video Files from SD Cards

The options listed below will help you easily retrieve videos from SD cards.

1. Restoring Videos from a Local Computer Backup

If you have your video files stored in a backup folder on your computer, all you need is to restore the lost or deleted videos from your local computer backup by copying and pasting.

While restoring, don’t forget to ensure that the device where you want to retrieve video works perfectly with no hardware or software problems.

2. Restoring Videos from Online Drive Backups

Creating drive backups is another potential way to protect your data from losing. If your videos are lost, check your drive backups before trying any other method. As soon as you find it, retrieve the videos you need on a safe device.

3. Recovering Videos from Damaged SD Cards

Usually, restoring lost or deleted videos from a physically damaged SD card becomes challenging. This is where SD card recovery services, like Wondershare Recoverit, play a crucial role. Try similar services to get your videos back from the damaged memory card.

4. Retrieve Videos from Mobile Devices

When you record videos from your phone, they usually go to iCloud or Google Photos. Therefore, if your videos are lost on your mobile device, never forget to look at these locations. You can also use built-in cloud applications to recover videos on your phone.

5. Updating Drivers

Bad drivers may result in making your SD cards inaccessible. Therefore, every time you access your card, make sure you use a good-quality card reader to improve its readability. You can update or reinstall drivers to get rid of this issue.

Part 3. How to Use Recoverit for SD Card Recovery?

To deal with the video loss issue on SD card, you can try Wondershare Recoverit sd card recovery software. It is an unmatchable utility designed to restore your lost videos and any other type of data from SD cards and thousands of other devices, including USB drive, pen drive, SSD, action camera, etc.

Recoverit works perfectly on all Windows and Mac computers. In addition, it doesn’t matter whether your videos are lost from SD cards due to virus infections, physical damage, accidental deletion, or any other reason; Recoverit will always be your go-to data recovery tool. Some of the potential features it offers are given below.

  • Recoverit supports more than 1,000 file formats.
  • You can recover data from over 2,000 storage devices, including SD cards, flash drives, cameras, computers, internal hard disks, and more.
  • It offers profound support for 500+ data recovery scenarios.
  • It enables you to perform a quick and deep scan while restoring lost or deleted videos.
  • This tool has the highest rate of successful data recovery: 98%.

3 Quick Steps to Recover Footage from the SD Card Using Recoverit

Download Recoverit, install the tool, and start following the steps below to get your videos back.

Step 1: Open the tool, go to the SD Card section, and choose your SD card. Then, hit the Start button to proceed.

Step 2: An automatic scan will be initiated to find your lost videos from the selected SD card. Wait until the process completes. You can monitor the scanning progress at the bottom of the screen. Moreover, if you find what you need, you can pause and finish the scanning process at any time you want.

Step 3: When it finishes, you can preview the data to see if it is the one you wish to get back. If yes, select the files and click Recover to save them on your system right away.

Summing It Up

Videos carry a huge amount of information, be it capturing a vlog, promotional content, family function, or other similar events. Losing your important video becomes frustrating indeed. In addition, recovering the lost video files is not a piece of cake, as they are bigger in size.

The reasons why you lose videos are listed above. For quick recovery, you can explore the local computer backup or drive backup, but if they don’t have what you are looking for, you will need a trusted third-party data recovery software like Wondershare Recoverit.

Whether you want to recover video from SD cards or thousands of other devices, like flash drives, computers, and cameras, Recoverit will be your best friend. Give it a try.