Photo recovery

HiGlo

I really hope someone here might be able to help me!!!!
I have just spent the last 2-3hrs copying all my photos off of my laptop hard drive onto my external hard drive. I've over 6,000 digital photos (including photos of my round the world trip 6yrs ago).
After I had it done I took some photos from previous backups I had done onto the extern drive and put them all into the same folder - so pretty much all my photos were in one place.

As I was flicking through the folders left on my hard drive, I noticed that the photo folder was still there so I deleted it cause I didn't want to keep the photos on my laptop as they take up too much space. (I know it's a totally bad idea to just have 1 back up!!!)

While deleting a message came up asking if I wanted to permanently delete the items as they were too big for the recycle bin, so I said yes. (you can see where this is going!!)

Anyway, so low and behold, when I deleted the "copy" of the photos on my laptop hard drive - it simultaneously deleted them off my extern hard drive. I have NO understanding of why that happened, but it did.

I have now permenantly deleted every digital photo I own..... I've already vomited and cried, so now I need to see if I can fix it.
Is there ANY way I could get them back????????

chin_grin

Try using Recuva and performing a scan with that.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Saganist

Dont write anything else to the external drive.

Then download photorec.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

And run it against your external drive. I've used this app on SD cards, USB sticks, Camera memory cards and External drive and it never fails me.

Good luck.

HiGlo

In my panic to attempt to get them back I used that recuva programme but it only recovered a small fraction of the deleted photos (about 2000 - most of which I actually managed to still have from an old back up last year - so only really a couple of hundred were rescued). The photos which seem to be totally and utterly gone is my folder with all my round the world trip photos - this is the bulk of my pics (almost 5000). When I did the recuva thing it advised against saving them to the same drive they were deleted from so (as I didn't have any other drive avail to me) I put them onto the extern hard drive. So, basically, I've already written stuff to the extern drive so it's prob too late to use that cgs security one.... Should I try it anyway??

Saganist

HiGlo wrote: »

In my panic to attempt to get them back I used that recuva programme but it only recovered a small fraction of the deleted photos (about 2000 - most of which I actually managed to still have from an old back up last year - so only really a couple of hundred were rescued). The photos which seem to be totally and utterly gone is my folder with all my round the world trip photos - this is the bulk of my pics (almost 5000). When I did the recuva thing it advised against saving them to the same drive they were deleted from so (as I didn't have any other drive avail to me) I put them onto the extern hard drive. So, basically, I've already written stuff to the extern drive so it's prob too late to use that cgs security one.... Should I try it anyway??

You can give it a go. What happens when you "delete" a file is the filesystem simply marks the blocks where that file used to be as free blocks, meaning any new files you write, could potiental overwrite your "deleted" files.

Not writing to the disk after you delete would mean that all the blocks of data you want back are still there and Recuva or Photorec can see this and is able to recover.

I would say you have defo trashed some files, but try Photorec and see what it produces.

yoyo

HiGlo wrote: »

In my panic to attempt to get them back I used that recuva programme but it only recovered a small fraction of the deleted photos (about 2000 - most of which I actually managed to still have from an old back up last year - so only really a couple of hundred were rescued). The photos which seem to be totally and utterly gone is my folder with all my round the world trip photos - this is the bulk of my pics (almost 5000). When I did the recuva thing it advised against saving them to the same drive they were deleted from so (as I didn't have any other drive avail to me) I put them onto the extern hard drive. So, basically, I've already written stuff to the extern drive so it's prob too late to use that cgs security one.... Should I try it anyway??

Did you recover files onto the same drive :eek: . Thats a big no no and yes chances are the other photos have been overwritten. Run PhotoREC but recover to another drive, not the one your recovering from, you may be lucky, but it sounds like they've been overwritten!

Nick

HiGlo

Well, I only have 2 drives. My hard drive and the extern drive. I physically clicked delete on the folder on the hard drive so to me, the extern was the only place I could recover to.
I guess I need to learn patience and wait for a more helpful answer than the first one I get!! ha! Yeah, I'm resigned now to the fact that they are prob gone.

I really don't understand how this happened. If I deleted things off the hard drive, why would they disappear off the extern drive too??? Is it that it "mirrors" the files until the process is completed (ie the extern drive is removed). If I had just disconnected the extern drive first, then this wouldn't have happened....

yoyo

HiGlo wrote: »

Well, I only have 2 drives. My hard drive and the extern drive. I physically clicked delete on the folder on the hard drive so to me, the extern was the only place I could recover to.
I guess I need to learn patience and wait for a more helpful answer than the first one I get!! ha! Yeah, I'm resigned now to the fact that they are prob gone.

I really don't understand how this happened. If I deleted things off the hard drive, why would they disappear off the extern drive too??? Is it that it "mirrors" the files until the process is completed (ie the extern drive is removed). If I had just disconnected the extern drive first, then this wouldn't have happened....

This is a common issue people have with Vista/7s new "libraries" feature. With libraries you can set a folder to contain content from another folder, via the "add to library" feature.
You should recover to the external drive, you did right there, run PhotoREC and don't install/create any new files on the Hard Disk, PhotoREC will recover all types of deleted files, it will take a while, but leave it running, Make sure to run photorec from the external drive!

Nick

HiGlo

HiGlo wrote: »

In my panic to attempt to get them back I used that recuva programme but it only recovered a small fraction of the deleted photos (about 2000 - most of which I actually managed to still have from an old back up last year - so only really a couple of hundred were rescued). The photos which seem to be totally and utterly gone is my folder with all my round the world trip photos - this is the bulk of my pics (almost 5000). When I did the recuva thing it advised against saving them to the same drive they were deleted from so (as I didn't have any other drive avail to me) I put them onto the extern hard drive. So, basically, I've already written stuff to the extern drive so it's prob too late to use that cgs security one.... Should I try it anyway??

Was that only a quick scan?

Try do a full scan. I done a full scan recently, just for the sake of it, and found 150,000 pics (most (every?) photos you view online are saved onto your hard drive until they are over written), some from 2 Windows installations ago (if that makes sense). Maybe try to do a full scan on the external HD.

riclad

this program can be used to recover data,or photos,
see http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
see here http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
i hear recuva is a good program ,testdisk has photorec as part of the download.
if recuva doesnt work try photoRec.
SEE http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step,
Your file system is very likely windows NTFS, on the laptop and ext drive unless its more than 6 years old. older versions of windows may use FAT, FAT32 drive format .
it should be intel/pc partition, fat or ntfs filesystem type.