[SOLVED] Data recovery on flash drive, personal questions

[LifelineIT]

UPDATE: I recovered the file. Thank you ddrescue and R-Studio.

First, I'm really sorry to have posted so much in the last couple of days. This morning has been...not good, and so I'm hoping you guys can help me with some guidance.

This morning, my fiancee' was in a nasty accident in my 2014 Sonata Turbo. She was T-boned by a car going ~40mph. THANKFULLY she juiced the gas enough before the impact that it hit the rear of the car instead of her. She's just got a broken wrist and severe soreness, I'm HOPING they total the car. After the initial impact she ran into a shale hillside and smashed the front end too. Yuck.

Anyway---I roll with a dash cam 24x7. Always on, fisheye. I pulled it as soon as I got there (~35 minutes after the accident.) The camera is set to record in 2 minute increments that overlap about 5 seconds, so no gaps. The accident happens at the very beginning of a new chunk, maybe 10-15 seconds in. Here's the pickle---when I pulled the cam, the chunk of files starting with the one from the accident and the next ~30 minutes are NOT THERE. It was a T-bone accident that spun her at least once all the way around, I'm assuming that this was a significant shock to the camera and it either garbled the files or stopped or lost contact w/ the card or something. It saves about 12-15 days of footage before looping. I know that the car was turned off, but it won't auto-shutdown for about 15 seconds and it does have a battery. I suspect most of that 30 minutes may be while it's off...

In just a minute I'm going to ddrescue the drive and then run R-Studio at it, which is my normal practice for physical disks. My question for the community is:

IS THERE SOMETHING ELSE I SHOULD DO INSTEAD?

She's been charged with being at fault, and I think any footage will bear that out. This intersection is pretty crazy. I just want it because she can't remember what happened and I want to know.

Thanks, and I'm sorry to ramble.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Glad to hear that your fiancee' is (relatively) okay! That must have been a very close call. If the impact killed the recording and you have everything up to the impact, why are you interested in what followed?

 

[LifelineIT]

I probably wasn't clear. I DO NOT have the recording that contains the impact. I have the one that ends ~15 seconds before it, and then about 30 minutes later when the power was turned back on.

FYI, make sure that your dashcam is plugged into a circuit with always-on power, not ignition power. Or buy a fancy one with G-shock recording.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Okay, thanks. I'd guess that you lost that chunk with the power cut and the cache containing the last 15 seconds didn't get dumped to the card. Pure speculation as I know nothing about these cams and how often they write to the card/clear the cache.

 

[LifelineIT]

That's my thought. If that's the case I'm going to make sure that folks who might buy this very popular camera know about this issue.

 

[LifelineIT]

Replying back in case you come back to the thread Larry, ddrescue + Rstudio recovered the missing file. Pretty well erases any doubt that my fiancee was at fault. Lol.

 

[Larry Sabo]

That's great, LifelineIT! Weird that it did indeed get created then somehow deleted.* I assume you were wishing the video would exonerate your fiancee'. Thanks for the update, in any event.

* Maybe the fiancee' deleted it? LOL (jk)

 

[LifelineIT]

It actually didn't get deleted. I'm actually not sure what happened. It wasn't there when I handled the camera, but it did appear in the image and it did also appear when the card was plugged in directly in r/o mode, which I hadn't even tried yet for fear of damaging data. It's short, but it includes the accident and runs until the camera shuts itself off after the car is turned off. No idea why it didn't show up in the camera itself. R-studio did manage to recover a bunch of older written over files, which I consider amazing.

Very weird. Now we just have to figure out why no airbags deployed and why the onboard bluelink crash detection didn't kick in, we pay extra for that. Side and front collision and no airbags = problem.