Treasured's Movie Repair Guide -- Find your lost files

If the lost files have been deleted, or the disk formatted, please look for an "Undelete" utility or a data recovery tool.


Several tips to find lost files on your Mac

The first place to look for corrupt movie files is the place where other movies are stored: 


Spotlight can reveal the recently modified files, just by typing date:today in the search field:


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But this usually doesn't find the files in hidden folders (temporary folders are usually hidden) or in external disks.


Creating a Smart Folder with the Finder gives you more control about the search: what disks to include, by date and by file size, ...

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The file can also be somewhat hidden.

The file and folders whose name start by . (dot) are not visible in the Finder.

You can make them visible by  using a simple Terminal command:


defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder


Or you can try to navigate directly to the hidden temporary folders:

The location of the file depends on the volume on which you were recording:

In Boot volume:
Boot volume is usually your internal hard disk. It’s the disk that contains the operating system and your home folder.
In this case, the movie file is located in /private/var/folders/

This folder is not visible in the Finder. It’s hidden because you are not supposed to store your data here. But there’s a way to explore this folder anyway:

From the Finder, use menu Go > Go to Folder … and type /private/var/folders/

A Finder window opens, revealing a few subfolders. Now you can search inside, until you find one or several files whose size and date of creation matches the incident.
Just move those files to the Desktop. Once on the Desktop, the files are safe.

In an external drive, or a volume that is not the Boot volume:
In this case the file should be in this folder:
/Volumes/nameOfExternalDisk/.TemporaryItems/folders.501/TemporaryItems/

Note the . (dot) before TemporaryItems, it makes the folder invisible in the Finder.
You must use Go > Go to Folder… and type the path like this:
/Volumes/nameOfExternalDisk/.TemporaryItems/

Do not forget to replace nameOfExternalDisk by the real name of the volume!

Then explore the subfolders until you find one or several files whose size and date of creation matches the incident.