found-footage
0Your Mac said it couldn't save that screen recording. It probably did — this finds it.
The story
When macOS screen recording fails with "Could not save recording," the file is usually still on your disk. macOS writes the finished recording first and then copies it to wherever you asked it to go — and it is the copy that fails. The original survives, in a staging directory nobody thinks to look in. found-footage checks that directory and the five other places recordings get stranded, reports what it found and why the save probably failed, and moves nothing unless you ask it to. Its first real recovery was an 18-minute 4K60 recording macOS had already declared lost.
Highlights
- ✦One dependency-free Bash script — one curl to install, works on a stock Mac
- ✦Read-only by default; --rescue is the only thing that moves a file
- ✦With ffmpeg installed it also reports length, resolution, and whether each file is actually playable
- ✦Explains the failure, not just the file — e.g. saving needs a second copy and you were short on disk
- ✦Run it sooner rather than later: these are staging directories macOS clears on its own schedule
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