Even with a proper 3-2-1 strategy you can still fuck up. I have used data recovery tools on SD cards and hard drives with varying levels of success as long as the drive was not re-used or wiped with DD or something. Archive: https://archive.today/Ifdv6 From the post: >>My normal process for transferring video footage from my Sony cameras to my computer is as follows: Run a sonydump script that copies all video files from my SD card to my local computer, then runs rm *.MP4 in the folder on the SD card, and ejects it. I copy the files onto my NAS, which has an hourly ZFS snapshot and also backs up that snapshot to my 2nd on-site backup server. At the end of the day, I run a sync command that synchronizes all my working set of files to an external Thunderbolt drive I always bring home with me. Unfortunately, as it was the end of the day yesterday when I got back from a video shoot, I had the folder on the external drive open, and not the folder where I copy the files to on my NAS. Thus, after I thought I had copied all the files to the NAS, I deleted the local folder on my computer. Then I ran the sync command, and apparently I have that sync command set to delete files that don't exist in the source. Oops. Just deleted all the new footage. And because I copied to my local Thunderbolt drive, and not my NAS, that hourly snapshot didn't have the new footage. No worries, maybe Time Machine backed up the footage in the mean time? Nope. Didn't wait long enough like I normally do before copying the files off the main computer.