Data Recovery online ??? is it ok

vucotich

Hi guys to cut a long story short my laptop went nuts a few weeks ago and I lost all my photos , emails,music etc and i was gutted .It went right back to the original 2006 settings .So i took it to a local computer shop where they charged me 50 cleaned my computer , deinstalled my norton 360 saying its poo and said nothing could be recovered .Since i have tried Stellar phoenix photo recovery and it has found some photos but not all.I dont want to activate it though if it might be dodgy? I have tried to load my norton back up files but for some reason its just not working ...I am a technophobe any friendly advice is welcomed :j

TakeThis

No need to pay: Recuva or PC INSPECTOR™

Though before you do anything, have a look at what is on your hard drive using WinDirStat

You should have posted here before spending £50 on those useless individuals.

waddler_8

First thing to do is stop using the PC right now to maximise your chances of recovering data.

Files are created all the time as windows runs and there is a chance that these files are overwriting the HD space taken up by your deleted files.

Recuva has a portable build you can run from a USB stick - Use another computer to download it if at all possible.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/builds


There's some info on DATA RECOVERY BASICS here:

http://www.aumha.org/a/recover.php

You should have posted here before spending £50 on those useless individuals

Oh yes!

macman

If you did a Factory Restore back to 2006 then there would be nothing left to clean anyway, so why did you then pay for that service?
Your data might have been recoverable via using a simple USB hard drive caddy on another PC, but it sounds like it may be to late now, as the data may have been overwritten.
Since the original drive is still being used (?) it would appear that all you had was a corrupted OS, rather thaj drive failure, and the data would have been easily recoverable at that stage.
Your laptop cannot have independently done a restore process, you must have initiated it yourself.
What about your back up of the original data, did you not have one?

RussJK

You will need something to back up onto, depending on the size of files that are actually recoverable. External hard drives are fairly affordable.

Piriform Recuva is very simple to use, and has a nice interface.

On the other hand, Photorec is a bit harder to use but has consistently recovered more files when I've tested them against each other (sometimes a big difference, especially on flash memory).

All the documentation for Photorec is here:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Sucks to be in your position.

You can see why people recommend keeping backups. I'm surprised though that you were willing to pay £50 for a job you didn't ask for, that actually made things harder to do what you asked for. All those writes to the hard drive could easily have made it harder to get at your music.

waddler_8

Part of your subs for Norton 360 goes to at least 2gb of online storage. Is/was anything backed up?

gaming_guy

..............

vucotich

I paid the £50 because the guy said he had restored it , cleaned it up and said to me norton is uselss and probably caused the problem and so he removed it and replaced it with a trial version of another anti virus . It was only when i got home that I discovered there were still no photos there , i was mad as a hatter but the guy just said how am i supposed to get stuff that wasnt visible when you gave it in ?i was furious because i explained exactly how it was when i dropped it off . I then went online , downloaded the photo recovery and found stuff myself .It is still there but there is a lot to retrieve so it keeps freezing half was though . I have back up disks i created with my norton but for some reason they will not load . thanks for the help so far guys

m5rcc

Used Recover my Files to great effect the other day

TakeThis

m5rcc wrote: »

used recover my files to great effect the other day

us$69.95??

m5rcc

TakeThis wrote: »

us$69.95??

14 day free fully-operational trial