Write Timeout on Tascam DR-70D after 4hr recording. Recovery possible?

[Tyson Persall]

I have a new Tascam DR-70D 4 channel recorder. We just had a big shoot day yesterday and recorded 2 hour shoot successfully. Following that we did a 4 hour shoot and when I went to hit stop on the DR-70D the LCD said "Write Timeout" and then all buttons froze up. I had to finally just pull out the SD card and hoped the files were okay but no files show up. I ran "Sandisk RescuePro" but cant find the file. SO, Lets say I was the FBI and this audio was going to save the world, is there any way possible I could recover the information on the SD card? Just trying to wrap my head around what happens when write timeout occurs after 4 hours of recording. This is going to make me paranoid about every recording i do in the future so i need to understand this. Thinking about going back to the DR-60D which never had this problem.
Thanks for any help anyone can give me about understanding this.

[Greg Miller]

Other folks have had the same problem, but infrequently. There are threads on gearslutz and on taperssection. The consensus seems to be that it's a media problem, not a machine problem.

However, I haven't seen anyone post a sure-fire way to find the missing data. I suppose it may or may not be there, depending on when the machine detected an error, and perhaps on other variables.

Does the machine automatically start a new file, when the first file hits the 2GB size limit? Is that a feature that needs to be turned on?

Certainly there are a number of file recovery programs out there. I have used "recuva" occasionally, but I've seen some folks who claim other programs are better. I can't claim any expertise in this area. I hope someone else has a good solution for you.

[Tyson Persall]

I appreciate the response.
While it could be a media problem, the card is Sandisk rated at 30mps and has worked successfully on 2 other Tascam recorders that i own. Perhaps the DR-70D needs a faster card than the DR-60D? I will be definitely be feeding it a 90mbps from now on but still worried the problem could happen again regardelss.

Yes, it creates new files at the 2GB limit, and there should be at least 2 files here to recover.
I am hoping to find out if the machine has recorded the data in some way but failed to create a .wav file out of it when i hit stop... Perhaps the data could be re-created to a .wav file by some intelligent recovery method. I will try Recuva and hope for the best. Thanks.

[Greg Miller]

From what I've read, some cards fail intermittently. Some fail only after they have been used for many read/write cycles. Basically, nothing is 100% foolproof. Tascam has a website that lists "approved" cards that they've tested; even so, no card is guaranteed to work forever.

Meanwhile, be very careful not to write anything else on your card. You might even want to slide the "record lock" tab just to be on the safe side.

I would *guess* that the machine would close the first file when it started writing the second file. But for your sake I hope I'm wrong. It's all speculation.

I do know that every WAV file has a header at the beginning that includes the letters WAV, then some info about sample frequency, bit depth, and finally file size. Of course the file size is written *after* the recording process stops, since the file size isn't know in advance. But perhaps the rest of the header is written when recording begins. If that's the case, a byte-by-byte examination of the data on the card should be able to find the starting point of the two files ... even if the file was not closed, and no file name exists.

If recuva doesn't work, do a thorough internet search for file recovery, even SD card, photo card, anything you can think of along those lines. I know there are a lot of programs out there. (Fortunately for me, I have not had to explore this topic too much, except for one crashed hard drive many years ago.) And of course there are some companies that specialize in data recovery. Depending on the dollar value of the missing files, you might even consider that option.

Again, good luck! And if you find a program that works, please post the info here. I'm sure other people would like to have a name for future reference ... just in case.

[Tyson Persall]

Thanks, I am currently running some recovery programs over night and will report back if I have any success or failure...

[Tyson Persall]

Well I tried multiple recovery programs and No luck. Appears the files never got on the card. I am going to have to re shoot the video. :(

[Greg Miller]

There's a company with a strange name -- something like "active @" -- that makes several different recovery products. I've used active @ partition recovery, to recover all the data on a hard drive after the entire partition had been deleted. I was quite impressed.

You might take a look at their file recovery software here :: Active@ File Recovery searches for lost & deleted files, recovers damaged volumes, disks & RAIDs

You can run the free demo version, and it will show you any and all files that it is able to recover. Then if you actually want to use it, you can purchase the key to unlock the software and proceed.

Of course there's a chance the files were not written to the card. Or maybe some of the data was written before the error flag. In either case, you'll have to re-shoot. But if you want to give it one more try, I suggest you check out this specific software.

[Darren Levine]

Do this for me:

open up your file explorer, and right click/mac click to bring up the info panel on the card. what does it show as the available/used space on the card? do the same in the general pc/mac browser, does it show an empty card or do there appear to be some space taken up even though there's no files

we had a sound guy's recorder lose power, and i did recover the files, but it wasn't a 70d