HELP! Ive just lost years of photos!

debitcardmayhem

ktez wrote: »

I am absolutely clueless when it comes to computers and tonight I have just proved thst fact.
I was trying to transfer photos from my laptop to an external hard drive to free up space. (it was my first time using an ehd which prob didn't help) I checked that the photos were in the external hard drive, went back to my laptop and hit delete. It asked did I want to permanently delete them as there was not enough room in my recycle bin and I hit yes!! When I went back into the ehd, the photos file is there but nothing in it.
Have I lost these forever? If I have, I will be distraught...
Any help greatly appreciated

Check that they are not still on the Laptop, the EHD probably does not have a recycle bin, and you may just have deleted them from there rather than the lappy.

birkee

Where did the file get copied FROM, has he copied the file, but NOT the contents?

TIP: When copying......check the 'properties' of the file you want to copy (i.e. 490MB for instance) and when copied, check the copied file properties, to ensure they are the same size.
The OP would have found that the original file may have been XXXMb, and the copied file e.g. 26Kb (just the file header itself. It would have copied in a second or two also, so expect a large file to take some TIME to copy...... Minutes maybe.)

trets77

hope you get them back .

if you do think about what would happen if your hard drive breaks . it's a common enough thing that you should consider backing up online .


i use Picassa web albums for £10 a year .

JasX

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

Once you are happy with the program restart the problem computer but don't do ANYTHING else other than download/install Recuva on there and run it.

I'd even suggest ideally don;t reboot the computer they were deleted from but rather remove the HDD and try to access it hooked up to another desktop as an internal drive

(tho obviously if you are using old OSs and have trouble recognising it DON'T opt to reformat it )

Hammyman

Why not just restore them from the backup you made?

ih8stress

ktez wrote: »

I checked that the photos were in the external hard drive,
How did you check this? Did you view the actual photos, or just see a file/folder icon on the ehd?

When I went back into the ehd, the photos file is there but nothing in it.

Hope you manage to get them back. As others have said, DON'T use that computer in the meantime - to avoid overwriting anything.

Good luck!

Dave_C_2

trets77 wrote: »

hope you get them back .

if you do think about what would happen if your hard drive breaks . it's a common enough thing that you should consider backing up online .

i use Picassa web albums for £10 a year .

Second attempt to post this, so apologies if the first one turns up.

I have to disagree with this from a money saving point of view:
£10 buys you 25 Verbatim DVD-Rs on a spindle. Each is capable of holding 4.7GB. Working on a huge 2.35MB per photo, this gives about 2000 photos per DVD. Multiply by 25 and that's storage for 50,000 photos, half that if you want dual backups.

Shirley 2000 photos at 2.25mb per photo will hit a limit on Picasa. At 1Mb/s it will take over an hour. And that's only the equivalent of one DVD-R

But Kudos for using Picasa

Pinkypants

How many times have you put in a DVD and it won't read??

I have many a time.

DVDs are not fail proof. Cheap agreed but that's about it.

Also how long does it take to sort and organise 4.7gb of data each time.

Online back up's are great, start it overnight and leave it. Even if it 1st takes a few weeks to do the initial back up. I reckon it's a great method, especially if used with an additional external hard drive for double back up.

banger9365

i used this to recover a hdd EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional ,
the hdd did not have a partion and windows did not see it any more
and recuva did not see the drive at all ,it only showed up in the bios ,windows saw it has raw data so it wanted to formate it when you tryed to click on it in admin panel

spannerzone

Dave_C wrote: »

Second attempt to post this, so apologies if the first one turns up.

I have to disagree with this from a money saving point of view:
£10 buys you 25 Verbatim DVD-Rs on a spindle. Each is capable of holding 4.7GB. Working on a huge 2.35MB per photo, this gives about 2000 photos per DVD. Multiply by 25 and that's storage for 50,000 photos, half that if you want dual backups.

Shirley 2000 photos at 2.25mb per photo will hit a limit on Picasa. At 1Mb/s it will take over an hour. And that's only the equivalent of one DVD-R

But Kudos for using Picasa

Yes you're right about it being a cheap option but it's also the most likely to fail when in a couple years time you find the batch of DVD's you used can no longer be read.

Think carefully before you put all your backups only on to DVD/CD...... personally I have several difference hard drives as well as some DVDram backups. There's no 100% foolproof backup option as any can and will fail at some point.