November 4, 2025
Backups, meet chaos
Recovering videos from my Sony camera that I stupidly deleted
He nuked a day’s footage with one click — commenters cry ad and preach backups
TLDR: A copying mistake and a destructive sync erased a full day of Sony footage, and a paid recovery app ultimately rescued it. Comments clash over whether it felt like an ad, praise the tool’s results, and preach a simple rule: keep camera cards until files exist in multiple places.
One creator’s worst nightmare: a copy-and-clean routine plus a wrong-folder moment wiped a full day of Sony clips. Network storage with hourly snapshots (think: a home server taking hourly photos of your files) missed it, and Time Machine (Apple’s backup) didn’t run in time. He tried free recovery tool PhotoRec, pulled back 100+ clips, but it wasn’t smooth. The plot twist came when paid app Disk Drill finally saved the day—after a buried setting was flipped. Cue comment chaos.
Some readers smelled marketing. One snarked it “reads like an ad,” while others shared real-world wins and a gospel of patience: don’t erase the camera card until your files live in multiple places. Old-school voices went further: buy more SD cards and stop deleting—humans mess up, storage is cheaper than heartbreak. Product folks raged at the UX: why tease success, take the money, then hide the actual fix in a submenu? Meanwhile, nerds begged for the juicy details—what is Sony doing under the hood that makes this so hard?
The memes poured in: “Time Machine wasn’t in time,” “rm = regret mode,” and “NAS = Not A Savior.” The community mood was clear: big sympathy, bigger side-eye, and a simple mantra—triple-check before you click.
Key Points
- •Author accidentally deleted new Sony A6700 footage during a multi-backup workflow due to a mistaken source/destination and a sync set to delete missing files.
- •The NAS’s hourly ZFS snapshots did not include the footage because it was never copied there before deletion.
- •Apple Time Machine had not yet backed up the files, so it was not a viable recovery source.
- •The ingest workflow deletes SD card files using rm (not in-camera formatting) to keep recovery feasible.
- •PhotoRec was used as the first recovery attempt and recovered over 100 video files; metadata shows XAVC S 4K, AVC HP@L5.1, LPCM16, and Rec.709 settings.