Surfers, mountain bikers, parkour athletes. They mostly use GoPro to record their activities. GoPro is a well-known action camera brand and it is recognized as one of the best action camera brands, with lots of existing models in the market.

Recording extreme activities like the ones done by surfers, mountain bikers and parkour athletes are surely challenging. Often times, it is impossible to re-record a certain scene. So, it can be so stressful to lose the footage you have taken. But, if you eventually have to lose your footage, you can try to get them back with Disk Drill.

What is Disk Drill?

Disk Drill is a software recovery tool that has extensive device support. You can use it to recover deleted photos from devices like Windows laptops, Mac, DSLR cameras, mirrorless cameras to action cameras like GoPro. Yes, you can use Disk Drill to recover deleted videos and photos from your GoPro camera and other camera types that use a memory card as the storage medium.

As an SD card recovery software, Disk Drill offers three ways to get your data back: Undelete Protected Data, Quick Scan, and Deep Scan. You can choose the best option according to your lose scenario.

Things to know before you recover GoPro Photos and videos

Before getting started to use Disk Drill to start recovering your lost GoPro videos, there are several things basic things you need to know first. GoPro, just like other digital cameras, uses a memory card to store your videos or photos. GoPro cameras have internal memory, but it used for the firmware and the camera’s internal functions. Some models might also have a very limited extra memory, but you need a memory card in order to make your GoPro camera operate properly.

GoPro file formats

GoPro cameras record and capture your videos using the h.264 codec and the MP4 file type. Some models — including HERO6 and HERO7 Black — use the HEVC (h.265) codec. On GoPro, each video is represented by three files like the following:

• MP4: Standard format of the recorded video. This file is used to view your work.
• THM file: a thumbnail format, 160×120 pixels image that represents a video.
• LRV file: A low-resolution video that contains the same information as the MP4 file. This is the proprietary file format used by GoPro to copy, playback and share the media files in the GoPro App on smartphone

Disk Drill itself supports the LRV file format despite its proprietary license.

How to use Disk Drill to recover deleted GoPro videos or photos

The Disk Drill GoPro recovery software is available for Windows and Mac. This tool is released as a freemium software. The free version of Disk Drill is restricted to 500MB. This tool has an easy-to-use user interface. You can use it even if you haven’t used any recovery software before.

In this post, we will demonstrate how to use Disk Drill on Windows. By the way, you can also read the official documentation of Disk Drill to assist you in restoring the deleted videos of photos.

Before getting started, you definitely need to install Disk Drill on your computer first. You can download the binary file of Disk Drill on its official site: Windows, Mac.

• Once Disk Drill is installed, connect the GoPro camera with your computer. Or, if you want to recover deleted photos from a memory card, insert your memory card to the card reader on your laptop.

• Select the GoPro memory card from the list of the available disks. Click the tiny arrow button and select a scan mode.

• Wait until Disk Drill is done scanning your memory card. Once done, Disk Drill will display all of the successfully scanned files. To restore them, you can click the Recover button on the upper-right corner.

• Or, if you want to recover several files only, you can select the files you want to recover by ticking the checkboxes. Right-click and select Recover to recover them.

Disk Drill will create a new folder under the Documents folder on your Windows account. You can change this default location on the Recover to: section on the Disk Drill interface.

Other things you can do with Disk Drill

As we have mentioned, Disk Drill is technically a recovery software. It comes with several capabilities other than restoring deleted GoPro videos. You can also it to perform SD card recovery, memory card recovery or SD card data recovery. You can read this page to learn more.

Disk Drill has a Pause feature which will be useful if you are scanning a large sized memory card on the Deep mode. You can also save the current session. By saving the current session, you will be able to continue the job of file recovery the next day without having to start over (from the scanning process).

The verdict

We know how it feels to lose videos or photos, especially crucial videos or photos that are hard to be re-taken. But, you don’t need to be hopeless if you lose videos or photos since there are recovery tools out there to get them back. Dik Drill is one of which.

With Disk Drill, you can recover the deleted videos or photos from your GoPro camera. Technically, Disk Drill can recover deleted photos or videos from devices that use a memory card as the storage medium, including DSLR cameras, mirrorless cameras, point-and-shoot cameras, and so on. This tool has a user-friendly interface that is extremely easy to use, even for those who haven’t used a recovery tool before. Disk Drill is available for Windows and Mac