My rendered video is missing? I rendered some footage, saved blender then closed it. I came back later and opened the file then realised I didn't watch the footage, so I clicked play render only for it to tell me that the file is not found.

I went to the location that the error was showing me (as it usually has the file there) but it's nowhere to be found. I checked my computer's recycle bin to make sure and it's not there either, so I'm at a loss.

What happened to the file?
By default, blender saves renders to a temporary folder, and deletes them after you close blender. It sounds like that's what happened. In the future, you should select a permanent folder to save the render to. This can be done here:



Unfortunately, there is no way that I know of that you can recover the lost render. However, if you select a render path, it should never happen again.