Did I tape over my DV tape??

[kginsbo]

I had a bunch of DV tapes mixed and now can't find one of my DV tapes. My fear is that I may have taped over it.
Is there a way for me to check a tape that is recorded on, to see if I recorded over something else?

I realize that if I did it's lost forever, I just want to know if I should stop looking for the tape or not. Thanks!

[zoobie]

I don't think that's possible
you may be able to search the ends of the tapes to see what's up
next time, flip the tab on the rear to"save" so you can't accidently record over it

[jbd5010]

With all magnetic media, you can only recover what was last recorded to the tape. All previous data is completely erased. The only thing I could think of is if you notice the time code on a certain tape reset to zero unexpectedly? That may indicate a new recording was inserted in the middle of a previous one... but I've never payed attention to or really used the time codes for anything. Always shut them off on the on-screen display, etc.

The only media you can really recover data from his hard disk drives (and on rare occasions, flash media). The reason you can recover "erased" data on HDD in some cases is that when you 'erase' a file, you just tell the hard drive's file allocation table (or whatever the equivalent is on NTFS) that the space is available. You may or may not actually use that physical space for quite a while, so special programs can recover the data there because it was never actually erased... just un-indexed and the sector marked "available."

It's like if you failed to move out of your apartment at the end of your lease but the landlord didn't kick you out until new tenants arrived