Help find videos randomly lost from SD card!!!

[TRD0810]

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 running 4.1.2 - I have all of my photos and videos set to save to SD card. I recently was moving photo and video files around (a little re-organizing) from within the photo gallery on my phone. I created new folders and moved files from their existing locations to the new folders. Battery went dead after moving the files (another issue entirely!!). When I powered the phone back on I seemed to have lost most of my files!!!! My phone was then saying that the SD card was damaged and could not be read. After much fussing about (and freaking out!!) and transferring the SD card from the phone to the computer and back again I seem to have recovered most of the photos to my computer. However, I am missing quite a few videos that I cannot find. I ran a recovery program that helped with the photos, but still no videos. I cannot find them within the internal data on the phone or on the SD card.

Where could the videos have gone?! Would moving the files from within the gallery cause problems with the SD card memory? Why would the phone randomly say that the SD card was damaged? My phone seems to be reading the SD card fine now - except that majority of the photos still are not showing up in the phone's gallery but only on the computer. Why am I able to recover photos but not videos??

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Also, majority of the videos that I have lost were NOT moved in the file re-organization that seems somehow to be my downfall....

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Any idea if the battery went dead and the phone shut off while it was in the process of moving a file? Just as with a hard drive, it's generally a bad idea for a device to shut off when it's busy writing to storage memory, so I wonder if an area of the SD card might have become corrupt during that process.

 

[TRD0810]

The phone should have been well finished moving the files before the phone shut off. I'd say the battery probably died 15-20 minutes after I had been messing with it.

 

[B. Diddy]

Another possibility is that the phone was accessing the SD card for some other reason when it died.

If you unmount your SD card, take it out, and insert it into your PC, can you see all of your photos and videos, including the new folders you created? I ask this because it's not clear to me if you tried to do a lot of file exploration when you first moved the SD to the PC.

 

[TRD0810]

When I put the SD card directly into the computer it only finds about 70 photos and NO videos. When I have the SD card in the phone and connect the phone to the computer via usb, then I can find most all of the photos and the new folders I created - but only about six videos.

 

[TRD0810]

With further digging this morning I think I have found ALL of my videos! Searching again through the files on the SD card (with the card connected to the computer directly) I found a file titled "LOST.DIR". All of the files in the folder were just numbers....no .jpg, etc. I went through each file individually and added ".jpg" or ".mp4" to the ends of the file names and VIOLA!! Found more photos and perhaps all of my videos! Yay!

Now I have ALL files saved to my computer and plan to buy a new SD card to start fresh Thank you for your help!

 

[B. Diddy]

Great! I found this definition of LOST.DIR on another XDA: "LOST.DIR is created by the fsck utility (fsck = filesystem check), it contains inconsistent data which was found during the fs check.
This can happen if you have not properly rebooted or powered off the device, or if writing cycles can not be completed."

That would go along with what we were discussing before.

 

[GSDer]

You may want to consider using something like Cloud Drive: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.amazon.clouddrive.photos to automatically backup your pictures/videos. The S3 seems to have a checkered history with corrupting content on SDCards. YMMV.

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