On Sunday, I flew my Mavic Air, taking a video  (4k) for the first half of the flight, followed by a couple of  panoramas. All seemed normal - as the recording was running, I could see  the elapsed time counting on the Go4 display, so I assumed it was  recording.

I had some videos on that SD card that were shot earlier in June, in  addition to the 06/21/2020 videos. I did my usual copy of all the changed files on the SD  card to a folder on my PC for storage, and all seemed OK.

Yesterday, I got around to looking at the videos, all were there EXCEPT  for the ones from 06/21/2020! I thought maybe somehow they got recorded  to the internal storage on the MA, but I checked, and that was not the case.

I scanned the SD card and internal storage with Rescuva undelete  program, and there WERE deleted files on the SD card with sizes that I  was expecting, and the prognosis for recovery were Excellent. I restored  them all to a folder on my PC (nothing was written to the SD card since  the flight on 06/21/2020).

Unfortunately, none of those files were playable, except for a small jpg thumbnail.

Has anyone encountered a situation like this? I looked at the flight  record file with CSView, the camera data groups, and confirmed that  recording was going on for the first half of the flight, followed by the  panorama series. It would seem that the video file was correctly  closed, since the recording was terminated normally, as opposed to  letting the recording stop on its own when the drone shuts down.

It looks like my only hope for these videos is to work with Rescuva tech support to see what they suggest. Does anybody know of a better undelete program for Win10?

I tried another undelete program, Disk Drill, and I did a quick scan,

Notice in the _DownloadCache_ folder, there are two very large files. They appear to be the correct size, and the date/time stamp has the date I took the video. They would be 4K MP4 files (actually they seem to be copies..there was only one video taken that day).

Does anyone understand how the the process that saves the videos works? Is this a temporary file?

Is there a way to determine what the filename would have been - i.e. what number would have been added?

How can I recover this into a valid MP4 file?

I was trying to upload a screenshot, but couldn't get it to work

It would have shown \DFS\_DownloadCache_\DFS_Shop_BL_V1_4_X_X_DT2019_03_13_17_5_01_.7z

Why would such a large file be in a \DFS\ directory??  Every time I see video files, they are in \DCIM\100MEDIA

Anybody??  Is this the wrong forum??

Hi. I am sorry for the trouble this has caused. With regards to the video cache files. The cache video files are temporary files that will be deleted and updated every flight. For the missing video, the video may not have been recorded properly. Since the video file is not present on both internal and external storage. Just a reminder to always please hit the record bottom before powering off the said drone for it to be able to save all the recorded video footage. Thank you.

DJI Paladin Posted at 6-30 02:53
Hi. I am sorry for the trouble this has caused. With regards to the video cache files. The cache video files are temporary files that will be deleted and updated every flight. For the missing video, the video may not have been recorded properly. Since the video file is not present on both internal and external storage. Just a reminder to always please hit the record bottom before powering off the said drone for it to be able to save all the recorded video footage. Thank you.

As to video not recorded properly, I don’t understand how that could have been the case here. I have screen recording of the whole flight, showing a video being recorded-watched available recording time count down. As to file being closed properly, would starting a panorama, not assure that the video file was closed first?  The data file .txt from my iPhone, shows the recording start and stop.
How can I recover the file?  Isnt the data in the temp file?