Lost files & photo's after restoring laptop back to original factory settings

CCFC_80

To cut a long story short this has regrettably been done on My Samsung laptop and have lost all my files and photos.

Have about 75% of them saved on a memory stick but hoping might recover the rest somehow. Is it going to be complex on how to recover them if at all they can be recovered.

Any thoughts on best way forward on this?

JJ_Egan

Try Recuva and other similar file restores .

Quiet_Spark

CCFC_80 wrote: »

Any thoughts on best way forward on this?

Take the hard drive out, install it in another machine as a slave, and follow JJ Egan's advice re: file recovery software.

Note the more you use the laptop between now and then, the less chance you have of recovery being successful.

Exo

As mentioned already, don't use the drive as writing data to it is likely to overwrite existing data.
The free recovery programs, whilst helpful, do have limitations and are not as powerful as paid for versions.

If the lost photo's have a personal or sentimental value and Recuva is not successful, then GetDataBack is a good paid for alternative. It does have a demo feature, which you can use before purchasing.
https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

From personal experience, I used GetDataBack when the MBR / partition table on all my hard drives became corrupted simultaneously and family photographs were at risk of being lost for good. Re-writing the MBR or partition table does not come with a guarantee of leaving other data on the drive intact. I tried several free recovery programs without success (they detected nothing), whilst GetDataBack recovered the lot.

If all else fails, then professional recovery may be required but does not come cheap.
http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/data-recovery-quote/?partnerid=zyr100

Backbiter

I had great success recovering loads of missing data with Glary Undelete - a free program.

CCFC_80

Thanks for all replys, the taking the hard drive out option to a technophobe wasn't considered. I Did download a free recovery option and found many of the files and photo's but couldn't open them as they came with a files corrupted message pop up

Oh well down to experience I suppose.