I'm sad. TC for Android has corrupted my video recordings during move operation

[Ark-kun]

I'd been to the probably last concert of the 40-years old band that I love.
On my Pixel 9 Pro I've recorded nice videos of what the band members said and what they played when they returned after the crowd refused to let them leave and continued clapping for minutes after minutes.
Nice memories.

But tomorrow I need to go an a trip to another country and I needed to free up my phone.
My Windows PC does not show my phone. But fortunately I have Total Commander for Android. I just connected an exFat USB flash drive to my phone and started moving files. I've aborted the move at some point and looked at the files. Immediately after moving, I saw that TC did not show thumbnails for one file in the middle (not the last file). It was that video of the band. I've just copied it, but it does not play. Hmm. I've safely ejected the USB flash, copied the files from flash drive to my PC, but the file does not play at all.

And nauseating feeling starts to sink in....

I suddenly remember how I copied photos/videos from a recent trip to another country and couple of videos also refused to play. That time I did a copy (unusual for me), so I copied those files 2nd time and diffed the files. What I saw is not just a simple truncation or a broken 4KB page. No. After a common start, I see hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of random noise. That's unrecoverable. I don't think Android files are recoverable at all.

While using TC for decades (and NC before it) I do not think I ever lost data like this. I've always used move instead of copy+delete to be absolutely sure that only files that are successfully copied are deleted.
But the app just wrote a gigabyte of random garbage to a file and deleted my cherished memories...

I don't know what to say here. I guess I was just a dumb fool for trusting TC with my data. Or maybe it's not TC, but the phone itself. Or the USB flash. Or cosmic rays. Or something else.
Anyways, I'm sad.

[ghisler(Author)]

Sorry to hear that! Total Commander copies with the standard functions of the operating system, which do not fail unless something is seriously wrong (hardware error).

I recommend that you check whether you have one of these fake USB flash drives which pretend to be, say 1TB large, but only hold 32GB. They are a real plague, many flash drives on eBay and Amazon are such fakes. There is no easy way to detect them for a regular program, but there are special tools to detect them. Google recommends H2testw, MediaTester, and FakeFlashTest, but there are many more.