New Acer deleted files without prior warning on a external hard drive

Cottage_Economy

GunJack wrote: »

are we overlooking the obvious possibility of recovering these photos..... i.e. the old lappy they were stored on ??

Unfortunately I removed those photos completely to the hard drive and only backed up the rest of his files.

Cottage_Economy

I've set it running and it's found 50 text and 5 jpg in the first 6 seconds. Trying not get excited. As there are hundreds of both types of files, I will come back later much later and report.

Cottage_Economy

Saver-upper wrote: »

Aww,bless you Cottage Economy.What a rotten day you have had.I am sorry,I am no good to advise you (I only learnt how to upload photos to FB this week-had to ask on the Techie board :eek:.Previously my 11- and 12-year olds have been my technical advisers :rotfl: ).
But I had to say,how lovely of Tavernman to spend the time talking you through it all.

I hope after you have slept on it tonight you are able to work something out tomorrow.Good luck-I will check back in tomorrow .

It is lovely of him and I'm very grateful.

bsod

as suggested, run deep scan on the old machine and the usb disk, deleting data doesn't actually delete it, same with the old camera card if you still have it.

If it finds any, you'll need somewhere new to copy it.

gjchester

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

Unfortunately I removed those photos completely to the hard drive and only backed up the rest of his files.

With respect (and this may sound condescending but that's not my intent) copying files from a device to another and deleting the original is not a backup. Backups means at least two copies in separate places.


Its also possible that the drive had issues / failed before it was plugged in, and the laptop saw it as a blank drive and offered to format it. I wonder if the scratch and sniff pad was over sensitive and you accidentally clicked the yes to format box if it popped up too quickly after a prior box.


I hope you get your files back, but please copy them to a second location, even if its burning a load of DVD's. I've had to send drives off for recovery at work where people have lost the only copy of a vital file buy putting it on a external drive and deleting the original only for the external device to go bad. Its possible to recover them but never cheap..

tavernman

GunJack wrote: »

are we overlooking the obvious possibility of recovering these photos..... i.e. the old lappy they were stored on ??

Sleep troubles Gunny :cool:, I went for the external drive , since that had only just been carped on, the original lappy would more than likely have been overwritten since it had lack of space

tavernman

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

I've set it running and it's found 50 text and 5 jpg in the first 6 seconds. Trying not get excited. As there are hundreds of both types of files, I will come back later much later and report.

Let's just see.....:D

Cottage_Economy

gjchester wrote: »

With respect (and this may sound condescending but that's not my intent) copying files from a device to another and deleting the original is not a backup. Backups means at least two copies in separate places.


Its also possible that the drive had issues / failed before it was plugged in, and the laptop saw it as a blank drive and offered to format it. I wonder if the scratch and sniff pad was over sensitive and you accidentally clicked the yes to format box if it popped up too quickly after a prior box.


I hope you get your files back, but please copy them to a second location, even if its burning a load of DVD's. I've had to send drives off for recovery at work where people have lost the only copy of a vital file buy putting it on a external drive and deleting the original only for the external device to go bad. Its possible to recover them but never cheap..

I didn't say I did that.

I said I copied the images to the hard drive and deleted them, then backed up the rest of his files the external hard drive.

The contents of my husband's laptop, as it stands, is backed up, apart from all the photos that were taking up gbs worth of space on his old-ish laptop and which were removed to the external hard drive wholesale.

Cottage_Economy

He's just reminded me a good few of the photos came from our old tower system, which is in the loft (he hates throwing anything away).

It's been up there for a good few years so if all else fails I'll get it down.

Well the results are in and although it looks good, it isn't.

PhotoRec 7.0-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, January 2015
Christophe GRENIER <[EMAIL="grenier&#64;cgsecurity.org"]grenier@cgsecurity.org[/EMAIL]>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Disk /dev/sdb - 160 GB / 149 GiB (RO) - Hitachi HTS545016B9A300
Partition Start End Size in sectors
1 * FAT32 LBA 0 32 33 4177 117 36 67108864 [RECOVERY]

569 files saved in /testdisk-7.0-WIP/recup_dir directory.
Recovery completed.

Most of the text files are gobbledygook, looks like html? I scanned through quite a few now and there's very little text I recognise in the documents. It seems that a few are relating to the kind of documentation that comes with computer software - 'Read Me' documents?

I'll go through them all later and separate the definites, but this represents only a fraction of what was there unfortunately.

It recovered 32 photos, six of which we recognise as ours and the others we don't. They look like shots from under a car but hubby is adamant that he doesn't recognise the part of the car being photographed. As he restores classic cars, he knows his stuff. It's definitely some kind of machined engineering component.

I can only wonder maybe the hard drive when I bought it new from amazon a few years ago wasn't entirely new?

tavernman

OK you will need to re-run and select full disk (rather than free space) that will take a long time , wasn't thinking too well last night