GoPro Recovery 1.27

GoPro Recovery is a program designed to just recover deleted, and corrupted videos from GoPro camera SD memory chips - and it works! NB, the program will not read the camera directly, but only the memory chip. GoPro cameras save the MP4 files in a way that means almost all other recovery programs fail. CnW Recovery have developed ways to recover that numerous fragments that make up a file and save them in the correct order. The process is simple, and automatic. This program is a concise subset of the CnW Recovery program and just works with GoPro cameras. There are two versions, standard and forensic. Both will perform the same basic recovery. The forensic version has enhanced logs and file hashing and will also (under development) recover unfinalised file and video extracts.

The software recovery package has several important features to solve all GoPro recovery issues - the main one is that it works!
Deleted file recovery, after accidental deletion or formatting
Separate routine optimised for each camera family
Log of all files recovered and their validation status and dates.
Optional forensic log showing all locations* used to reconstruct the GoPro video file
Recovers JPEGs.

Features available soon (for forensic version)
Unfinalised file recovery. eg if memory chip is removed while recording, or there is a serious physical damage to camera that prevents finalisation. Currently under going testing for Hero 3
Recover old fragments of video

Recovery from memory chip or hard drive?
This software package is designed to work with the memory chip only. If you read below you will discover that the data on the memory chip is very fragmented. Once copied to the hard drive, the file is typically in a single sequence and so can be recovered with data carving. Many companies say they can recover GoPro Hero files but actually mean they can recover from a deleted hard drive. We are not are of any other package (except CnW Recovery) that will work with the original GoPro memory chip.

GoPro Studio -auto deletion
GoPro Studio has a feature where the SD memory card can be deleted automatically after copying to PC. Unfortunately there are reports of the copy not working correctly, but the memory chip still being deleted. Fortunately GoPro Recovery will rescue users from this problem. Just make sure that the card is not written to or used before a full receovery is made.

Why is GoPro complex to recover
A MP4 style video file has three main elements, ftyp, moov, and mdat. Ftyp is a simple header that contains a small amount of fixed information. Moov contains amongst other elements, pointers to every frame in the video. Mdat is the video stream.

When a recording is started the length is obviously unknown. It could be a few seconds or several minutes. At this point some cameras start a ftyp-moov atom, and others store it in memory. The the video is written in the mdat atom. However, GoPro Hero 3 and 4 cameras can store a low resolution file (.lvr) as well as the standard MP4. These are stored in blocks, physically interleaved. This there may be 256 sectors of low resolution, followed by approx 4096 sectors of high resolution. The blocks are puer data streams with no nice headers and reconstruction is not simple. The GoProRecovery program has to analyse the contents of each possible block in order to determine if is correct. An added complication can be still JPEGs embedded in this data stream - which can include a simple thumbnail photo. This type of file structure means that GoPro and simple data carving does not work.

Fix corrupted video files
There are many programs that claim to fixed corrupted video files. However, I suspect most of these corrupted video files are in fact incorrectly recovered video files. It is possible to reconstruct indexes so that a file may play, but it is impossible to recreate video frames that have not been recovered. GoPro recovery aims to recover the correct data first and only if indexes are missing recreate the index.

Log file
The program does produce a comprehensive log. This includes all files recovered, sizes, dates and details about video resolution. The forensic version also includes hash values and full details of the location of each fragment recovered.

Forensic Version
Currently under development, the optional forensic version will have extra features to assist in any legal investigation. The most important will be extended logging, in particular it will display all fragments that make up the reconstructed file. Each file will be hashed with MD5, a standard forensic requirement. There will also be additional recovery modes that will scan for video sections that are not part of a current, or recently deleted file. These will be reconstructed to create a playable fragment. The updates will be released when available and may be obtained by just downloading a new version. There will be a simple upgrade path to upgrade a standard licence to a forensic licence.

Home Page - http://www.goprorecovery.co.uk/