Troubleshooting

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Roughly nine out of ten .rsv files recover on the first try in the browser, with nothing to configure. Of the rest, nearly all recover once a technician has looked at a sample and tuned the engine. So far we have not met a genuine Sony .rsv that stayed unrecoverable. The live first-try figure is on the stats page.

So if your file did not come back immediately, the useful assumption is not “this one is lost”. It is “this one needs an extra step”. Here they are, in the order worth trying.

1. Reload the page and run it again. Some failures are a transient bug on our side rather than anything about your file.
2. Copy the .rsv off the card to an internal drive first, then run it from there.
3. Check the drive your browser saves to has room, and that it is not a card, a network share, or a cloud-synced folder.
4. Add a reference clip if the tool asked for one.
5. Send us a sample with your email address. A technician inspects the file and adjusts the engine for it. We write to you when it is supported, and you run the same file again.
6. A refund is yours for the asking at any point, no argument. It is worth knowing that step 5 usually gets you the footage and a refund does not.

Retrying is free. The unlock is keyed to the file, not to a session or an account, so a file you have paid for can be run as many times as you like, on this machine or another one, without being charged again.

Copy the file off the card first

Worth doing before anything else, and it prevents two of the more common failures on its own.

Reading a hundred gigabytes straight off a card, through a reader, over a hub, takes a long time, and anything that interrupts it (the reader sleeping, the hub dropping, the card being ejected, the file being moved while the tab is open) surfaces as a read error partway through. Working from a local copy also leaves the card untouched, which matters if a later attempt needs it.

Do not save the recovered file back to the card either. It needs about as much room as the original, and cards rarely have it.

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”This looks like an ordinary video file”

The most common message by a wide margin, and usually the least alarming: the file that was dropped in is not an interrupted recording.

• It is a normal .mp4 or .mov. Nothing to repair. If it does not play, the problem is the player or the codec, not the container.
• The interrupted take is elsewhere on the card. Look under PRIVATE/M4ROOT/CLIP for a file ending in .RSV. Proxies live in SUB and are named with an S## suffix.
• It is a .mdt. That is Panasonic Lumix’s interrupted-recording file, not a Sony .rsv. Use Panasonic’s in-camera Video Repair function or the desktop LUMIX Repair Tool.

”We couldn’t find any recoverable Sony video in this file”

Different message, different situation, and the one genuinely hard case. The file carries no Sony recording structure at all: no metadata records, no MXF label, nothing the camera writes.

This is what a file looks like after something other than the camera has been at it. Most often the card was formatted or overwritten and the file was pulled back with undelete software, which recovers the name and the size but not necessarily the bytes that were underneath.

A file named .RSV that has been through that is not the same thing as a Sony .rsv, and the promise at the top of this page does not stretch to cover it. If you have the original card and have not written to it since, stop writing to it and talk to us before doing anything else.

”Needs a reference clip”

A few .rsv files do not carry the small block of codec setup the tool normally reads out of the file itself. Without it there is no way to know how to decode the picture, so it has to come from somewhere.

Any clip that recorded correctly on the same body at the same settings will do: same resolution, same frame rate, same codec. Length does not matter, a few seconds is plenty. A normal .mp4 or .mov off the same card is ideal. Only the codec setup is read from it, and like everything else it is processed in your browser and never uploaded.

If the clip you picked did not work, the settings almost certainly differ somewhere. Check frame rate first, then resolution, then the recording format.

If the filename ends in S01, S02 and so on, you have the proxy rather than the take. The camera cannot record a proxy on its own, so the full-quality version is on the same card under CLIP: recover that instead. If the take closed cleanly it is already sitting there as a playable .MP4.

If no matching clip exists (it was a one-off setting, or the card holds nothing else), that is a good moment for a sample. Several cameras that once needed a reference clip now recover on their own, and each one got there this way.

Nothing is charged at this point. The reference clip is sorted out before the paywall.

”No preview”

The preview failed to build. This says nothing about your file, and nothing has been charged.

The preview and the full recovery read the file in completely different ways. The preview holds a window from the front of the file in memory to build a short playable clip; the recovery streams the whole thing to disk and holds neither. Files whose preview dies recover perfectly often enough that a failed preview is not evidence of anything.

That said: do not pay for a recovery you cannot preview. The preview exists so you can see your own footage before deciding, and buying blind is not a deal we want to offer. Talk to us first. Send a sample with the message and we will tell you what is in the file and what it will take.

”Download interrupted”

The browser stopped writing partway through. Almost always the drive filled up.

A recovered file is roughly the size of the original, so a large take needs a large amount of free space at the destination. To send it somewhere roomier, open your browser’s download settings and change the location, or switch on “Ask where to save each file”, then start again.

Avoid saving to the card the footage came from, to a network volume, or to a folder that syncs to iCloud, Dropbox or OneDrive. Sync clients move files out from under a write in progress.

Restarting after this costs nothing. The file is already paid for.

”Couldn’t fix this file”

The catch-all: the recovery began and stopped for a reason that is ours to figure out.

1. Run it again, on a fresh page load. Some of these are memory pressure rather than the file. Closing other tabs and heavy applications, and not running two recoveries at once, genuinely helps.
2. If it happens again, send a sample and leave your email. This bucket is where the engine gets better. A message like this generally means the file is doing something we have not seen, and seeing it is the whole fix.

If you paid for this one, you should not be out of pocket while we work on it. Either ask for a refund, or hold on and let us fix the file. Most people who wait get the footage.

The file recovered, but the picture stops partway

The recovery reported success and the file plays, then the picture freezes or the clip ends early while audio continues.

There are two different things this can be, and they are worth telling apart:

• The camera never wrote any more than that. An interrupted recording contains whatever reached the card before it stopped, which is not always as much as the length on the card suggests. No tool can return footage that was never written.
• We stopped early when we should not have. This is a bug, and one we would very much like to see.

We cannot tell which from here, so get in touch and send a sample. If the recovery genuinely came back short of what was recorded, that is a refund and we will say so.

Browser and machine

The tool needs the browser to write a very large file straight to disk, which only some browsers can do:

• Works: Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers on macOS, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS.
• Does not work: Safari and Firefox, which have no File System Access support, and phones and tablets of any kind. There is no iPhone, iPad or Android version and no way to make one work.

If the page loads but the repair will not start, reload first, then check you are on a current version of one of the browsers above.

It looks stuck

Recovery speed is bounded by how fast your disk reads and writes, and these files are large. A typical clip finishes in minutes. A hundred-gigabyte take takes considerably longer, and the “Finishing up” phase can sit still for several minutes at the end while the browser flushes the last of the file to disk. That is normal, and it is not frozen.

While it runs: leave the tab open, do not let the machine sleep, and do not move or rename the source file. Expanding the Output log shows what it is actually doing.

You paid and something went wrong

• A reload does not cost anything. The unlock is attached to the file, so reopening it, or opening it on a different computer, picks up where you were with no second charge.
• Clicking pay twice does not charge twice. An unfinished checkout is remembered and reused.
• You do not need a receipt or an order number to get help. Naming the file is enough, though a receipt makes it faster.

Sending a sample is the real fix

When a recovery cannot complete, the panel offers to upload a sample. This is the single most useful thing you can do, both for your own file and for the next person with the same camera.

• It sends the first 64 MB of your .rsv (which includes the opening seconds of footage), and a slice of your reference clip if you picked one. There is an option to send the whole file when the problem is late in a long take. Details are in Privacy & your files.
• It only ever happens when you click the button. Nothing else about your footage leaves your machine, ever.
• Leave an email address. Without one there is no way to tell you when your file works, and that message is the entire point of sending it.

What happens then: a technician looks at the actual bytes, works out what the camera did that we had not accounted for, and adjusts the engine. The change ships, we write to you, you run the same file again. Because the unlock is keyed to the file, that second run costs nothing extra if you had already paid.

This is not a queue you disappear into. It is how most of the cameras on the stats page came to be supported.

Nothing here fits

Talk to us, by chat or email. Useful things to include:

• The camera body, exactly (ILME-FX3, ILCE-7SM3, and so on).
• Your browser and version.
• The size of the .rsv, and what the Output log said.
• Whether you got a preview.