Ran out of USB Drive space, video stopped recording, and lost audio.

[FurtherMocker]

Hello, this is my first ever post here on the OBS forums...

So my friend and I just got done recording a total of 74 minutes of video; one file is the first 68 minutes and the second one is the last 6. The reason this happened is because after recording the first one for 68 minutes, it stopped, telling me I ran out of space on my USB drive. I shrugged it off, thinking it wasn't a big deal, and began recording again on one of my computer drives (most likely HDD), and finished up shortly after. I then moved both recordings to the computer drive, then attempted to remux them to my USB drive, after deleting some unneeded files on it. The second one remuxed just fine, but the first one didn't, with OBS telling me the file may be incomplete (I tried two more times, same outcome). I tried to open it from the folder, and Windows wouldn't let me watch it. So then I imported it into Premiere Pro; the footage was there, but without audio. Ouch.

So I'm wondering if it's possible for me to recover the audio at all. Thanks to anyone who decides to take the time to help me out! :)

 

[AaronD]

Were you recording directly to MP4? The metadata for that can't be finished until the recording stops and the total size is known. And without that, the computer is more-or-less flying blind to try and find the data. It's technically on the drive, but it might be in danger of being overwritten by another app because the file is still marked as being smaller than it really is.

If it's really critical, STOP USING THE *ENTIRE* COMPUTER IMMEDIATELY, and either use a *different* system yourself to run some recovery tools on it, or take it to a professional shop to do that. The more you use the computer AT ALL after the data loss, the more hopeless it becomes, often measured in seconds or less, especially for a full drive because there's nowhere else to go.

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If you record to MKV per the recommendations, it doesn't need to know everything to read anything. So what you did have would still be easily accessible.

It's plumb easy to convert after the fact from MKV to MP4 if you really need that, but a fair number of next steps do take MKV directly, so you might not even need to do that.