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Nixonss's avatar
Nixonss
Brass Contributor
May 22, 2026

How to recover deleted videos from sd card in Windows?

The SD card from my car dashcam seems to have lost all its recorded video files — not sure if they were accidentally deleted or overwritten during a recording cycle. Plugged it into my Windows PC hop...
Alinaim's avatar
Alinaim
Copper Contributor
May 22, 2026

The "Previous Versions" feature in Windows is not a data recovery tool in the way you might think. It does not scan your SD card to find deleted files. Instead, it provides an interface to access backups that you already created ahead of time using either File History or the older Windows Backup and Restore tool. Then, you can recover deleted videos from SD card.

About how to recover deleted videos from SD card. This is the only true recovery method without software, but it depends entirely on whether you had set up a backup system beforehand. It is a long shot for a dashcam SD card, but worth checking.

Here's how to check for "Previous Versions":

1. In File Explorer, navigate to your SD card's drive (e.g., D:).

2. Right-click on an empty space in the drive or on a folder where the videos were stored.

3. From the menu, select "Restore previous versions."

If Windows has any shadow copies or backups saved from the past, they will appear in the list. You can then select a version and click "Restore." However, this feature is often not enabled for removable drives like an SD card by default.