Deleted file still working, can it be resurrected?

[Bo Berglund]

I was editing a 1GB mp4 video file residing on an Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS server.
After defining the clips for one section I ran the terminal command that creates
the clip and then moved on to the next clip in the video editor.
However, by accident I also removed the video source in the terminal using rm
videofilename.mp4 when executing the clip paste command...
(Normally the source contains only one video, but this had two after each
other.)

Notwithstanding the removal the video editor allowed me to walk through the
second half of the 4 hour source video file and define the 10 clips to create
the second output video command! So I was able to use the source video still
even though it had been removed....

But the terminal command to create the second video failed since the source did
no longer exist.

This is very confusing for me, on the one hand the video file seems still to
exist since I could move around in the video and pinpont the cut points for the
second 2 hour section and on the other hand the file did not exist when actually
being requested for the cut-and-paste final operation in terminal!

I am doing the rm error now and then and if there is a way to restore the
removed yet seemingly existing file I would like to know how that could be done.

The file system on the server is ext4 and the video editor (based on VLC API's)
runs on another (Windows 10) computer via a samba share.

Any ideas what could be happening?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden