Good news: all my 10+ video files have been recovered by a hacker expert on the 3rd floor of the Wan Chai computer market in Hong Kong (hkd$1600), he says they used a lab to open up the SD card and do some type of operation on the card, about an hour later they had all the files ready to be transfered back to my storage. Thanks to everyone who posted suggestions for how I could have done it myself!
Trying to restore the video files very slowly (it seems to take over 12 hours per video) using GetDataBack for FAT (on Windows 7), I will try to follow the suggestions posted in the comments in this thread (thanks a lot for your suggestions for how I should proceed to try to recover these video files!) in the next few days to try to see if the video files can somehow be recovered. I’m hoping that the data is not physically damaged but that the SD card just has some kind of temporary file system corruption going on with it. This makes me want to upgrade to a more professional camcorder that can record to 2 SD cards simultaneously for redundancy.
Here you can see the resulting video trying to restore each video (a process that seems to take something like 12 hours per 400mb video file using GetDataBack for FAT):
This is terrible if I cannot find a way to recover these files, it’s a whole days worth of video-blogging that would be nearly unusable. I understand that an eventual physical damage of the SD card would be impossible to recover from. But I have thus far video-blogged about 30 videos from the HKTDC Electronics Fair (more to be video-blogged there tomorrow), over 30 videos have been filmed at the China Sourcing Fair and nearly 30 videos were filmed at the Shenzhen Electronics Fair.
Please let me know if you can recognize a possible bug in the way I am trying to recover the file looking at that file on YouTube or analysing it here as I’ve uploaded a copy of this original recovered video sample to Google Docs. (my airbnb appartment in Hong Kong seem to have more than 20mbitps upload connections on their free WiFi access points which is awesome to upload videos overnight. Even uploading HD videos over HSPA+ is fast enough to be done on the unlimited $78hkd 7-day SIM cards one2free and other Hong Kong 3G carriers offer).
