Getting Photos Back!

BBM77

Hi all,

Somebody might be able to help me with this. A couple of years ago my laptop had a software fault and I could not get it started up. There was some photographs saved on it that are important to me but I did not have them burned on to a CD yet, foolish I know. I decided to cut my losses and used the system restore discs and started the computer from scratch. These worked but of course deleted all the stored files.

I was listening to an item on the Last Word about computer security and how nothing really is fully deleted from the hard drive of a computer and it is possible for files to be recovered after they have been deleted. I have seen file recovery software but I do not know if they will work in my case.

Can anyone tell if the photographs I mentioned above can be recovered? If they can, how would I go about it?

Thank in advance,
BBM.

irlrobins

Not after two years of using the hard drive I would imagine (a professional firm might, but at huge expense). You're best chance to get them back would have been right after the system restore. Since then, your drive has been in constant use probably, so the 0's and 1's that made up your photo data will more than likely have been overwritten with new data.

Cabaal

I'd have to agree with irlrobins, unless you spend thousands after so much use your not likely to get anything back

Leginos

Chances are that you have overwritten the files too many times. However, if you have a large hard drive and you only use up a small portion of it then it may be possible (don't get your hopes up though) that you haven't overwritten the files. Here's a link to some software I've used many times:

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1

Be warned, this could be very time consuming as it will essentially list EVERYTHING you have on your hard drive, temorary internet images etc etc. and it generally doesn't list them with the filenames that you used - for example you might have saved a pic as myhouse.jpeg, that the software will call dc3.jpeg, so check them all. I once recovered some photos on my laptop that I'd deleted about 2 years earlier. I was lucky since I don't really use my laptop for anything more than some casual browsing and typing as I use my main PC for most things, hence no large files, and used only a small % of the hard drive (i was also too lazy to bother defragging it, which probably helped!). If you have no joy with it, try a few other data recovery programs, giyf.

Best of luck.

BBM77

Thanks for the advice, I thought it would be a long shot alright.