Treasured's Movie Repair Guide -- Disk Utility

Disk Utility, a Mac application sitting in your Utilities folder, is one of the methods to read a damaged disk but not the preferred one.


When your memory card gets corrupt with tens or hundreds of megabytes of footage, video clips or movies, you have not one but two problems:

For the second problem, we have the solution: Treasured for diagnostic, then a Repair Kit that we develop for you.
But for the first one, until recently, we could just recommend to use a data recovery software. Stuff relatively expensive, and that would give average-to-good results only: Data Rescue 2, FileSalvage, Stellar Phoenix 3, Boomerang, UnDelete Plus, Recover4all, …

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Until we discovered Disk Utility!
Disk Utility is a program that sits in your Utilities folder. It ships with every copy of Mac OS X.
And it’s not even a data recovery program.

This small program is capable of creating a disk image of your damaged card. It’s like copying the card, but instead of copying the files as the Finder would do (remember, it’s corrupt, it won’t help), Disk Utility copies the card, as is.
Imagine instead of a corrupt card, a damaged book with some missing index pages. The Finder would say it can’t copy anything because without index it doesn’t know where the chapters are.
Disk Utility would just photocopy the whole book, without asking questions.

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Creating your Disk Image from the damaged drive…


This disk image, a .dmg file, contains all the recoverable media. Because it contains all what the card contains.
The beauty of the disk image is that we no longer have files, just raw data.
So if you use Treasured on the .dmg file, you can preview all the media. From all files as if they were just one.

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Image Format: read-only

Compression: none (or it won’t work!)


Finally, the Repair Kit, working on the .dmg file, will restore in one shot all the media contained in the card: All the clips will be merged into one playable movie file.

Now let’s be a bit more technical:
Why does Disk Utility work better than data recovery products?