Lost photos off PC...

[havoc]

...and I really don't think they're recoverable.

Holiday back at Easter, started sorting photos early summer - 4 different parts of holiday, then reviewed and separated good into a sub-folder of each part (and deleted the truly bad stuff).

Didn't get any further.

PC was acting up at the time, decided to do a full rebuild. So I backed everything up to DVD-RWs. Reformatted the drive (oh yes...clever me eh?!?). Rebuilt PC, reloaded everything on. Went to Goodwood, got excited about FoS shots, left holiday pics for a bit.

Went back to holiday photos tonight...only to find that one of the 4 'Good' folders is missing!!! And it's the stuff from Halong Bay (google it...amazing place...one of the highlights of the holiday)!!! No...not good.

...go dig out the DVDs...go through them, find the Vietnam folder...go into it...and **** **** **** **** - the 'Good' folder is missing from the DVD too!


Have just spent better part of an hour going through EVERY DVD I backed stuff up to...going through every single folder on each...and nothing...can't think of another place they'd be...hadn't got around to burning a 'show set' yet...



...they're only photos, not memories, but **** I'm down about it right now...

[Malx]

Nasty, feel for ya. I though i lost some holiday snaps last month and i wanted to cry.

Maybe its an excuse to rebook another holiday there to recapture the memories?

Depending on how valuble the photos are to you is it worth looking to a company to try and recover the data? Some do a no recovery no fee scheme. Might be worth it?

[Gingerbread Man]

If you can still access the hard drive, you can use software to try get them back.

Buttt... you should stop reading and writing to the disk as if it's still there, you may overwrite it.

I can feel your pain. I've spent the last two days trying to recover as much as i can, I redid my computer, new OS. backup has failed, so trying to get images/documents eyc.... back

Goodluck. I'll check back in morning.

David

[lowdrag]

While it is little consolation I now back up everything and albeit belt and braces have two external hard disks. That way if I have a crash at the very worst I just unplug, buy a new computer, and fire it up. I am not a technical wizard but i have read numerous times that it is not easy to actually delete things from the disk and most are recoverable in one way or another. Look for proprietary software to help you and - good luck!

[Hut49]

I can imagine your anguish and I'm not able to help on the smart software that does exist that might be able to recover these files. However I recently found some photo's that I thought I had lost but were actually miss-filed in a place I would never have looked. They magically appeared after I installed Picasa which searched the computer after install and organised every picture file it found. Might be worth a try while you're waiting for someone with more technical ability to help - good luck http://www.picasa2.com/en/download.html

[havoc]

Hut - I've done a filename search on all internal drives and they've not appeared, so not accessible via straightforward means.

GM - I thought if you re-formatted the drive that was it - game over?!?
I had the larger harddrive as my data-drive, and the C-drive (physically separate) was getting full and slow, so I took the opportunity to swap them over and put the newer, larger, faster drive as the C...worse, I partitioned it to have a 'C' section and a 'Data' section!

[Simes205]

Even after a reformat of drive the files are recoverable as no data is actually erased from the drive.
To recover your data will cost around £250.

[robbydee]

I get very paranoid over this happening, so i have a back up exteranl drive,

Which is backed up by another! but where do you stop...

[neil-f]

This would be better posted on the computers and stuff forum people like Paul(cue99t) would be able to give you an expert answer.

[Malx]

havoc said:

I thought if you re-formatted the drive that was it - game over?!?

Nope, if i remember rightly the data leaders are removed so basically the drive does not see the data so the area on the disk is seen as free. Thinking it's all gone is the reason so many people get busted for having dodgy stuff on their drives.

If you're will to stump out some cash you should get it back

[havoc]

£250 is a hell of a lot for some photos, to be honest.

I'm not saying it's not skilled and time-consuming, and therefore commands that price...but for me, it's possibly not worth the money (IYSWIM). I don't make any money from my photos, they're just aide-memoirs...souvenirs, almost.

[baz7175]

Do some internet hunting, there are plenty of packages out there available for you to be able to recover the stuff yourself...

It's something I had never looked into until an old neighbour asked if I could try and retrieve some stuff that his daughter needed for her school project that they had lost during some local firm's eejit reformatting their drive to cure a simple virus issue...I found some 30 day trial software somewhere to do the job and managed to recover everything they were looking for and some old pics they thought they had lost too...

Pain in the butt thing is I've no idea what the software was called that I found and used, but it was very simple to use that I do remember...

Good luck

[Gingerbread Man]

Havoc, YHM

David

[trackdemon]

Recommendation for worst case scenarios...... www.mozy.com

[finnyuk]

Havoc add me on MSN if you have it. i may be able to help you out.

its [e-mail]

Edited by finnyuk on Friday 12th October 23:48

[fluffnik]

There's a linux program called PhotoRec - part of the testdisk package in Debian - which I've used with moderate success on disks from a failed stripe set, formatted XFS.

It seems to depend on files being contiguous, but it's a lot better than nothing...

It's also non-destructive.

...and there seems to be a Windaes version here

Best of luck!

Debian package testdisk said:

Partition scanner and disk recovery tool
TestDisk checks the partition and boot sectors of your disks.
It is very useful in recovering lost partitions.
It works with :
* DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
* NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP )
* Linux Ext2 and Ext3
* BeFS ( BeOS )
* BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
* CramFS (Compressed File System)
* HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System
* JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
* Linux Raid
* Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
* LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
* Netware NSS
* ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6
* Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
* UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
* XFS, SGI's Journaled File System
.
PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover
lost pictures from digital camera memory or even Hard Disks.
It has been extended to search also for non audio/video headers.
It searchs for
* Sun/NeXT audio data (.au)
* RIFF audio/video (.avi/.wav)
* BMP bitmap (.bmp)
* bzip2 compressed data (.bz2)
* Source code written in C (.c)
* Canon Raw picture (.crw)
* Canon catalog (.ctg)
* FAT subdirectory
* Microsoft Office Document (.doc)
* Nikon dsc (.dsc)
* HTML page (.html)
* JPEG picture (.jpg)
* MOV video (.mov)
* MP3 audio (MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1) (.mp3)
* Moving Picture Experts Group video (.mpg)
* Minolta Raw picture (.mrw)
* Olympus Raw Format picture (.orf)
* Portable Document Format (.pdf)
* Perl script (.pl)
* Portable Network Graphics (.png)
* Raw Fujifilm picture (.raf)
* Contax picture (.raw)
* Rollei picture (.rdc)
* Rich Text Format (.rtf)
* Shell script (.sh)
* Tar archive (.tar )
* Tag Image File Format (.tiff)
* Microsoft ASF (.wma)
* Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture (.x3f)
* zip archive (.zip)

[havoc]

Good recommendation Alistair...just finished using it and it dug-out GB of data...easy to use and seemed to come out with a full list of stuff.

...sadly no Vietnam photos...can only assume they got overwritten.

Oh crap!


Thanks all anyway...it was worth the day's effort to try...

[fluffnik]

havoc said:

Good recommendation Alistair...just finished using it and it dug-out GB of data...easy to use and seemed to come out with a full list of stuff.

...sadly no Vietnam photos...can only assume they got overwritten.

Oh crap!


Thanks all anyway...it was worth the day's effort to try...

Glad it helped.

Sorry it didn't help much.

[sneijder]

Saved me posting a new topic, will give this a go tonight after a numpty session on my new laptop.

[havoc]

Good luck...and FFS install Photorec to a different hard-drive...it writes the files (as default) to the location it's been installed to!!! You can change it though, I think...