Help, recovering my lost photos!

The_stingemeister

Mine is the same old story I'm afraid, laptop crashes and when I get it up and running again my UNSAVED files are missing. Now before anyone says "you should of backed up", the reason I didn't was because these items weren't that important to me (really important stuff I always copy to CD). Having said that I would like to retrieve these photos if possible. Now, I've used a recovery disc, a system restore point and I've "de-fragmented" since the crash, so is there still a way of recovering these photos? Now I don't want any software/suggestions thats possibly going to jeopardise the health of the laptop (its simply not that essential) but is there a way?....Thanks.

robt_2

Am I missing something, or are you saying that your files were unsaved? If that is the case, they were unlikely to of ever been on your computers hard disk, so no, you can't retrieve them.

The_stingemeister

They were saved in My Documents but not to an outside source (like a CD).

totalsolutions

You should not have defragged the drive. You shifted good data and overwrote on top of your photo's then, very smart. Never interfere with a drive structure during file recovery. Make a complete hard drive image/copy of it first and work with the copy.

robt_2

totalsolutions wrote: »

You should not have defragged the drive. You shifted good data and overwrote on top of your photo's then, very smart. Never interfere with a drive structure during file recovery. Make a complete hard drive image/copy of it first and work with the copy.

Agreed - did you intentionally defrag?

The_stingemeister

totalsolutions wrote: »

You should not have defragged the drive. You shifted good data and overwrote on top of your photo's then, very smart. Never interfere with a drive structure during file recovery. Make a complete hard drive image/copy of it first and work with the copy.

If I was "very smart" about computers, would I be asking for advice here? :rolleyes: :rolleyes: I defragged to improve laptop efficiency, I assumed the photos were lost anyway. Its only in retrospect that I thought I could salvage them.

espresso

The_stingemeister wrote: »

If I was "very smart" about computers, would I be asking for advice here? :rolleyes: :rolleyes: I defragged to improve laptop efficiency, I assumed the photos were lost anyway. Its only in retrospect that I thought I could salvage them.

If you are going to ask for advice, you should have asked before doing anything!

:rolleyes:

torbrex

I know it sounds obvious but have you done a search/files folders/pictures?

toasterman

I've had some success with this:
http://www.pandorarecovery.com/
Freeware (for personal use) data recovery software.

I'd say its worth installing and running to see if it finds anything. I'm not optimistic though, with the sequence of events that have happened already.

wildheart_2

use a prog called get data back or get back data)you have to run it from a different drive to the one being checked out.you may be lucky but as previous posters said chances are you have overwritten the data.good luck;)