Help. lost photos whilst trying to make backup

closed

Run this on the c: drive

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.HTML

It's so small (229kB) the odds of you overwriting any data area with pictures in is very slim, windows/virus scanner updates are much bigger, so you may wish to turn them off while you resolve this problem.

Usb flash drives aren't a good place for backups, use a DVD and/or external hard disk

I would take the usb drive out of the equation for now (safely remove hardware!), and see if you can get the pictures back from the hard disk to another disk drive or partition (preferably). If that fails, then work on the flash drive.

MadTechie

Putting them on another partition is fine,
The problem is data is written to your hard drive all the time (including when you visit websites), if theirs a chance the data is on your USB then its worth using another drive..

in addition RussJK please read the part you quoted, I never said save it to the hard drive i said

last thing you want to do it add data to a drive you wish to recover from!

now if that's incorrect please speak up!

Dollardog

RussJK wrote: »

Yes you've been a lot clearer, I just wanted to make sure I knew what you meant in case I told you something completely irrelevent.

It may be worth checking that you haven't accidentally lost more than just the pictures. Before you delete any of the 'My Documents' folder from the USB stick - make sure that those same files are still on the hard disk. Just do a random sampling of a few files and that will give you an idea. If there are files on the USB stick that aren't on the hard drive, then the files may have been moved rather than just copied.

As for the encrypted JPEGs, I'm not sure to be perfectly honest. It may even be that the verbatim program has encrypted them on your hard drive, and so made them appear as no data. The main thing is that you know not to write any more data to the hard drive, so if you need to you may be able to recover the files with the undelete tool.

Anyway, I hope you recover your files and I hope things will be okay for you.

I don't think its encrypted them on my hard drive, the ones on the USB drive say ENC, whereas the ones on the hard drive don't.

RussJK

Dollardog wrote: »

Could it still overwrite if I put it in another partition?
I don't have another drive to write anything to. Could get another memory stick though when I get back.

Oh yes of course you can! You can recover files to another partition, as well as run the undelete program from another partition. So you can run the undelete program from drive D and recover the files to Drive D.

Dollardog

I've tried http://www.undeleteunerase.com/files/recover_files.exe
and http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.HTML

but neither of them came up with my photos unfortunately.

I wrote them both to another partition and ran them on my c drive#

I suppose that means they are lost on that drive?

closed

Did you tick include used clusters by other files, and include even if the file size is zero?

If this has just happened, and your drive isn't full, it's very surprising that there is no sign of the file in the mft, unless you are using some wipe free space software.

If you have encrypted the data on the stick, do you know the password?

Dollardog

closed wrote: »

Did you tick include used clusters by other files, and include even if the file size is zero?

If this has just happened, and your drive isn't full, it's very surprising that there is no sign of the file in the mft.

If you have encrypted the data on the stick, do you know the password?

I did it with file size zero, first, it came up with 9 files that I don't know what they are.
I've just done it agin with both the boxes ticked and it came up with 14, still no sign of any jpeg files.
Would they be classed as deleted though because the files are still showing in the 'My Pictures' directory, just with a file size of 0 bytes.

Dollardog

closed wrote: »

Did you tick include used clusters by other files, and include even if the file size is zero?

If this has just happened, and your drive isn't full, it's very surprising that there is no sign of the file in the mft, unless you are using some wipe free space software.

If you have encrypted the data on the stick, do you know the password?

Yes, I logged on to it with the password.

RussJK

Dollardog wrote: »

I suppose that means they are lost on that drive?

Strange. It could be because the filenames are intact but empty.

I've read only briefly about the verbatim USBs - do they force encryption onto you? Because you never said why the files were encrypted in the first place. It may be worth taking this up with Verbatim when you get back, as hopefully it may just be something weird with the verbatim software - that the files are there but inaccessible.

What is the specific name of the encryption and synch software?

closed

Which operating system and do you have a virus scanner?