How to Recover Your Lost and Corrupted Videos: A Complete Comparison of Methods

Video corruption is more common than you’d think. Whether you’re a content creator or someone who just accidentally damaged an important recording, losing video files can feel devastating. This guide explores both manual recovery techniques and advanced software solutions to help you retrieve your precious videos.

Understanding Why Videos Get Corrupted

Before jumping into recovery methods, it helps to know what causes video files to fail in the first place. Videos can become corrupted through several scenarios:

Interrupted transfers are a leading culprit. When you move files between devices and the connection drops unexpectedly, the video data doesn’t transfer completely. Power failures, unplugged cables, or sudden device disconnections all contribute to this issue.

Damaged storage devices also play a role. SD cards, USB drives, and hard drives degrade over time. As they age, they develop bad sectors that make stored videos unreadable or structurally broken.

Recording interruptions happen when you force-stop your camera or phone mid-recording. This abrupt shutdown prevents the file headers from being written properly, leaving your media player unable to decode the video.

Software crashes during video editing can leave frames incomplete or misaligned. When your editing software suddenly closes mid-operation, the resulting file contains inconsistent data that causes playback failures.

Malware and system errors damage the underlying data structures that videos depend on. These threats can modify or overwrite critical metadata, breaking the entire video playback.

Quick Manual Fixes to Try First

Before turning to professional recovery tools, several built-in Windows features and manual techniques can save your videos without extra software.

Converting Your Video Format

One simple approach is converting the corrupted video to a different format. This forces the video container to rebuild its metadata and structural framework from scratch. The re-encoding process cleans up problematic sections that originally caused the corruption. Follow these steps using an online converter:

Step 1. Upload your damaged video file to a format conversion tool and select your target video format.

Step 2. Once the conversion completes, download the newly formatted file to your device.

This method works particularly well when the container is damaged but the video content itself remains intact.

Checking Your Recycle Bin Folder

Many people accidentally delete videos while troubleshooting. Your recycle bin folder often contains perfectly usable versions of files you thought were gone. Recovering from here is instantaneous and requires no technical knowledge:

Navigate to your recycle bin folder, locate the deleted video file, right-click it, and select Restore. The file returns to its original location ready for playback.

Using File History for Previous Versions

Windows File History automatically creates backups of your files when enabled. If corruption occurred recently, an older version saved by File History might be completely intact. Here’s how to access it:

Step 1. Find your corrupted video file, right-click it, and open Properties.

Step 2. Click the “Previous Versions” tab and review the “Date Modified” column to find a version created before the corruption happened.

Step 3. Select that version and click Restore to replace your damaged file with the clean copy.

This approach is reliable if you’ve maintained regular Windows backups, though it only works for recently corrupted files.

When Manual Methods Fall Short: Professional Video Recovery

The manual techniques above can succeed, but they’re time-consuming and often limited in scope. When these methods don’t work, professional recovery software becomes your best option.

Wondershare Recoverit represents a robust solution for video recovery situations. The tool reports a 99.5% success rate and handles corrupted videos that manual methods cannot touch. Its batch processing feature lets you recover multiple damaged videos simultaneously, dramatically saving time compared to fixing files one by one.

The software’s deep scanning capabilities penetrate your storage system to locate and retrieve missing files that standard Windows tools overlook. Recoverit supports recovery from over 1 million different storage devices and handles more than 1,000 file formats, making it versatile enough for virtually any video recovery scenario.

Key Features of Recoverit

The tool distinguishes itself through several capabilities:

Extensive format support covers not just videos but documents, images, audio files, emails, and thousands of other file types across a single platform.

Preview functionality lets you inspect recovered files before saving them. This prevents you from recovering the wrong version or restoring a file that remains too damaged to use.

Multiple recovery scenarios are handled automatically. Whether your video was deleted accidentally, lost due to formatting, corrupted after a crash, or inaccessible due to file system errors, Recoverit adapts to each situation.

Steps for Recovering Videos With Recoverit

Step 1. Launch the software and select the storage device or folder where your videos were located from the interface panel.

Step 2. Initiate a scan. The tool searches the selected location for all recoverable files, displaying results as they’re found.

Step 3. Preview the videos that appear in the recovery results to confirm they’re the files you need.

Step 4. Click Recover to save the restored video files back to your device.

Manual Recovery vs. Professional Tools: Which Approach Wins?

Comparing these approaches reveals important trade-offs:

Manual Windows methods only retrieve files that were recently deleted or backed up through File History. These approaches depend entirely on prior setup—if your recycle bin folder wasn’t enabled or backups weren’t active, recovery becomes impossible. The depth of scanning is limited to whatever Windows already preserved.

Professional tools like Recoverit don’t require previous backups. They perform comprehensive scans that search your entire drive and rebuild damaged file structures from scratch. This capability extends to deeply corrupted files that Windows tools cannot repair. You get support for thousands of file types, including heavily damaged videos and images that recover completely unusable through manual methods.

When files are corrupted rather than simply deleted, professional recovery software excels. Manual recovery can only restore existing copies—it cannot repair corruption. Recoverit actively repairs damaged video files during the recovery process itself, delivering playable results rather than just restoring the broken original.

The trade-off is straightforward: manual methods are free but limited; professional recovery tools cost money but solve problems manual recovery cannot touch.

Final Thoughts

Corrupted videos don’t have to mean lost memories or lost work. You have options ranging from simple Windows features to advanced recovery software. For minor cases where files are only recently deleted, your recycle bin folder or File History may solve the problem immediately. For serious corruption or large-scale data loss, professional recovery tools like Recoverit offer the reliability and versatility needed to restore your videos successfully. With a 99.5% success rate and support for thousands of file formats and storage devices, Recoverit transforms seemingly permanent video loss into a recoverable situation. The choice between manual and professional recovery depends on your specific situation, but either approach beats accepting corrupted video files as a permanent loss.