I accidently deleted some very important files from my xa10 hard drive... does anyone know if it's possible to retrieve them??? help please!!!!

There might be a way, Nick, so hang in and wait for a response. Good luck.

As with any other hard drive and solid state drive, even though the files are deleted they are still there, they are just not visible. But they will stay there so long as the space is not needed.

In other words, whatever you do, do NOT record any new footage or delete any existing footage.

There is a tool I think for recovering files from AVCHD cards, not sure, but I wonder if something like that might help.

Seagate makes a recovery tool, but I doubt that it would work for a camcorder, but it might.

I would think that if you have the camera hooked up to your computer via the USB cable the computer would see it as a hard drive and the recovery software would work just like it does with data on an SD card in a computer reader. Of course I could be wrong. According to my wife I am wrong a lot.

A couple of years ago my daughter accidentally erased an SD card with some important pics on it and searched the internet and found a recovery program that would let you try it out first to see if it was going to work for you (recovered pic had a watermark). Once you confirmed it would work I think it cost around $30 to purchase the full version to extract the pictures. I don't remember the name of the program though.

I would think that if you have the camera hooked up to your computer via the USB cable the computer would see it as a hard drive and the recovery software would work just like it does with data on an SD card in a computer reader.

A typical recovery procedure first makes an image of the SD card and stores it on the HD. This image is made using a specialized low-level copy routine that bypasses the filesystem and preserves every bit of information whether deleted or indexed from the card. After copying the image, keep the SD card in case you need to try the recovery procedure again.

The image of the SD card is then searched for blocks that look like parts of .mts files. Millions of blocks will be examined and compared. It is best to use a recovery program designed specifically to recover .mts files, since these files have identifiable headers and continuous time codes that make them much easier to recover than other kinds of deleted files. In the end, the recovery program sorts the blocks, merges them and writes them out as recovered .mts video streams.

Like the previous post, I've only done this with still images and therefore can't recommend a specific software.

I just did a search using "recover deleted mts files from camcorder". There is recovery software out there. Never having used one of them, I can't make a recommendation.

There's a reverse engineering company based in Richmond Hill, I can't remember the company name but they specialize on recovery. They charge a hefty fee but they get the job done, they charge around $ 1000. Hope this helps.

Was this from a SDHC card, or the internal memory?

Deleted file recovery is possible, but not assured. Depends on what has happened to the camcorder or memory subsequent to the file deletion. A variety of software products are offered for recovery, and results are mixed. Some could make things worse.

Some of the SDHC card venders offer file recovery utilities as well. Keep in mind that formatting for AVCHD is not quite the same as routine data formatting.