Friend wanting tech pointer...

[erfan_starled]

Help recovering picture files requested

A friend of mine asked for help with something I know nothing about. I offered to copy this here in case a quickie answer gets her further toward a solution. (I have not the least idea.)

Setare (setarezan ) posted the following:

I deleted ALL my pics from the last 2 years (including muse-pics, holiday-pics, family-pics,

Comments

[heartofoshun]

I have no ideal! Hope someone else can help. (Running off to find the little plug-in gizmo to backup my photo files! It's been a while.)

[erfan_starled]

Yeah. Good idea!!

I'm amazed the number of friends who crash and don't have back-ups. Bound to happen to me, of course, as well.

I see a couple of suggestions on her lj but I'm sure one or two more won't go amiss if anyone does add something. You might even like to look-see on her lj and see the answers there?

Thanks Oshun.

[morethmusing]

External hard-drive + off-site storage for the really critical bits... It's the only thing that stopped me going bat-shit Fëanor-type insane when my PC keeled over (twice).

At last count I had 25,000 photos. I feel her pain :S

[morethmusing]

First thing to tell her - urgently - is not to write any other data to her hard-drive!

The reason being that the areas occupied by the deleted files will be flagged as available. Right now they can be recovered, but not if they are over-written.

On the rest, I'll get back to you ASAP. (I'm not running Vista so I need to check what works on it...)

[erfan_starled]

Oh, righty-ho. Done that. And big thank you.

[morethmusing]

Okay - I have two suggestions:

This software: http://premiumdatarecovery.info/?campaign=DataRecovery-Names&ad=recover%20files

Or this one: http://www.pctools.com/file-recover/

Both can be tested before she has to commit any money (sorry, I can't see anything free that will work properly). Both should work on Vista. Of the two in a brief test here (on XP) I'd say the first worked best.

It may be possible to slave the harddrive into another PC and use the DOS chkdsk to recover the files, but that is a painful process! I recommend buying the software if at all possible.

ETA: It's downloadable, so no long delay waiting for it to arrive... (and although I virus scanned and it was clean, I always recommend people run their own ;P )

[erfan_starled]

This was interesting. Thank you very much! I've passed this on to her. You may not hear immediately from her/me because she is not necessarily going to be on-line for a while.

Thanks very much indeed! I'm very grateful to you for having a look. Thanks for your time and effort.

[erfan_starled]

See also j_dav's helpful tips:

http://j-dav.livejournal.com/63969.html?view=531169#t531169