How to Recover a Full Session Medal Recording That Was Deleted

Medal.tv has become one of the most popular clip-capture tools for gamers, offering automatic session recording alongside its shorter highlight clips. But when a full session recording disappears — whether you deleted it accidentally, Medal wiped it during a cleanup, or storage issues caused data loss — the recovery process isn't as straightforward as it might seem. What's actually possible depends on several factors specific to your setup.

What Is a Full Session Recording in Medal?

Medal records gameplay in two distinct ways. Clip mode captures short highlight moments triggered manually or by in-game events. Full session recording (sometimes called "Full Session Capture") records everything from the moment you launch a game session to the moment you close it — often resulting in files that are tens of gigabytes in size.

These session files are stored locally on your PC, not on Medal's servers by default. This is an important distinction: Medal's cloud infrastructure stores your shared clips, but full session recordings are generally too large to sync automatically. That means cloud-based recovery is typically not an option unless you manually uploaded the session.

Where Medal Stores Session Recordings

By default, Medal saves files to a local directory — commonly found under your user folder or a custom path you may have set during setup. You can check or change this in Medal Settings → Storage. The actual path will look something like:

C:Users[YourName]VideosMedal 

or a custom drive location if you redirected storage. Knowing this path is the starting point for any recovery attempt.

🗂️ Recovery Option 1: Check the Recycle Bin

If you deleted the file manually from within Medal's interface or from File Explorer, Windows may have moved it to the Recycle Bin rather than permanently erasing it. This is the simplest first check. Open the Recycle Bin, sort by date deleted, and look for large .mp4 or .ts files matching your session's approximate size and timestamp.

This only works if:

• The file was deleted through a standard delete action (not a "permanent delete" or Shift+Delete)
• The Recycle Bin hasn't been emptied since the deletion
• The file wasn't removed by Medal's own internal cleanup process

Medal's internal deletion — such as automatic storage management — may bypass the Recycle Bin entirely.

Recovery Option 2: Check Medal's Temp and Cache Folders

Medal sometimes retains temporary segment files during recording before fully assembling them. Depending on the version and how the session ended (normal close vs. crash), you may find partial .ts segment files in a temp directory. These can sometimes be stitched together using a tool like VLC Media Player or FFmpeg, though this process is technical and results vary.

Look in Medal's AppData folder:

C:Users[YourName]AppDataRoamingMedal 

or

C:Users[YourName]AppDataLocalMedal 

Segment files here are not guaranteed to exist, and their availability depends heavily on how Medal exited and which version of the app you're running.

Recovery Option 3: File Recovery Software 🔍

If the file is gone from the Recycle Bin and no temp files exist, the next layer of recovery involves data recovery software. Tools like Recuva, Disk Drill, or TestDisk can scan your drive for deleted file structures that haven't yet been overwritten.

The critical variable here is time and drive activity. When a file is deleted, the operating system marks the storage space as available but doesn't immediately overwrite it. The longer you wait and the more you use your drive, the higher the chance that space gets overwritten — making recovery impossible.

This is especially relevant for:

If your Medal storage is on an SSD or NVMe drive — which is common on modern gaming PCs — acting immediately matters significantly more than on an older HDD setup.

Recovery Option 4: Medal's Cloud or Account History

Medal does not currently back up full session recordings to the cloud automatically. However, any portion you clipped and shared through Medal's interface may still exist in your Medal account's clip library, accessible at medal.tv. These will be shorter clips, not the full session, but they may contain the moments you care about most.

Check your Medal profile's clip history before assuming everything is lost.

Factors That Determine What's Actually Recoverable

Not every deleted session recording can be recovered, and the outcome varies significantly based on:

• How the deletion happened — manual delete, Medal's auto-cleanup, or a system crash
• Drive type — HDD vs. SSD vs. NVMe (see table above)
• How much time has passed since deletion
• Drive usage since deletion — every write operation risks overwriting deleted data
• Whether segment files were fully assembled before deletion
• Medal version — older versions handled temp files differently than current builds

Someone running Medal on a secondary HDD with low daily write activity has a meaningfully different recovery outlook than someone using a primary NVMe drive that runs a game library, OS, and active applications simultaneously. ⚙️

If Recovery Software Comes Up Empty

If no recovery method surfaces the file, the session recording is likely gone. Medal's architecture prioritizes local, high-speed recording over redundancy — which is a deliberate tradeoff for performance, but it means there's no hidden backup layer to fall back on.

Going forward, the variables that matter most for protecting session recordings are storage configuration (dedicated drive vs. system drive), auto-cleanup settings within Medal, and whether any external backup — even a simple scheduled copy to another drive — fits into your recording workflow.

Whether any of these recovery paths applies to your situation depends on which specific combination of factors matches your actual setup.