Lost some pics can I recover them??

[03civicdx]

well my computer has been running like **** lately so I decided to back up all my pics and **** and redo my pc. well me being stupid I cut and pasted alot of pics to the cd drive instead of copy and paste well I guess something happen during the pasting to the disk drive because after the status bar went away the pics were not in the disk drive folder to burn them and they are not in the "my pictures" folder anymore. I did a system restore to yesterday and still not there. My question is... Is there ANY WAY to recover these pics? I need to know bad I have lost all the pics I have of my kids except for the ones I have on facebook and myspace and they are just ****y quality now. and I still have the ones we have printed out of course but I lost ALL the pics of my daughters 1st and 2nd birthday I'm at the point where I'm ready to just huddle in a corner somewhere and cry because I did such a stupid mistake I NEVER cut and paste I always copy and paste IDK WTF I was thinking.

[eobrieniv]

not really any easy way. let this seve as a reminder to back up, back up, and back up. this doesn't help you now, but try to invest in some kind of off-site backup. carbonite is a good paid solution. you can also try wuala.com. wuala is nice because it is free. you give up some of your local space to the cloud in return for some off-site space.

[03civicdx]

HA backup is what I was doing! lol

[eobrieniv]

Quote: Originally Posted by 03civicdx

HA backup is what I was doing! lol

thats true, but you should be backing up ALL the time. not just when you plan on reinstalling your operating system. you should have a schedule, back up once a week to an external drive, then also off-site. optical media is NEVER a good solution for backing up, it is very prone to failing.

in my case I have four copies of every picture. my local pc, my windows home server, external drive, and off-site.

[03civicdx]

Quote: Originally Posted by eobrieniv

Quote: Originally Posted by 03civicdx

HA backup is what I was doing! lol

thats true, but you should be backing up ALL the time. not just when you plan on reinstalling your operating system. you should have a schedule, back up once a week to an external drive, then also off-site. optical media is NEVER a good solution for backing up, it is very prone to failing.

in my case I have four copies of every picture. my local pc, my windows home server, external drive, and off-site.

Going out ASAP to buy an external hard drive just for pics. I downloaded a program to use to recover files running that now guess we will see if that works. I hope so my wife is so upset about losing all these pics of our kids.

[eobrieniv]

best of luck.. i know the feeling, that's why i take the precautions i do.

[DennyCrane]

There's numerous programs out there that will restore deleted files. When you delete a file (accidentally or not), you're not erasing it from the drive, you're just erasing the computers record of where it is. You might want to try the free trial of system mechanic pro at iolo technologies - The PC Tune-Up Experts. I'm thinking it might have an undelete function... and if not, there's plenty of other ones out there. In the mean time, use the computer as little as possible so you don't accidentally over-write the files.

[03civicdx]

Quote: Originally Posted by DennyCrane

There's numerous programs out there that will restore deleted files. When you delete a file (accidentally or not), you're not erasing it from the drive, you're just erasing the computers record of where it is. You might want to try the free trial of system mechanic pro at iolo technologies - The PC Tune-Up Experts. I'm thinking it might have an undelete function... and if not, there's plenty of other ones out there. In the mean time, use the computer as little as possible so you don't accidentally over-write the files.

I'm not using it at all except for trying these programs to recover. if i have to i will take it some where to pay someone to get them off of there its worth it to have those pics of my kids back. hell CSI finds **** on peoples ps all the time from years back so im sure i can get them back some how. just trying the free ways first lol.

[skieur]

Bottom line is a data recovery service. They can recover almost anything off a a hard drive or any memory device. Charges can from $300 to $500, but it may be worth it, depending on what was lost.

skieur

[03civicdx]

Quote: Originally Posted by skieur

Bottom line is a data recovery service. They can recover almost anything off a a hard drive or any memory device. Charges can from $300 to $500, but it may be worth it, depending on what was lost.

skieur

Oh it would be worth every bit of that they were really priceless pics. 2500+ pics of my kids and the first 2 years of my baby girl and about 8 years worth of pics of my son so I would have payed that if I had to but....

Bought a program called getdata for $40.00 it found 2500 lost or deleted pics got the first cd burned and most of them are some I lost so that good but theres alot of random internet pics on there too from temp. internet files kinda odd I seen random sig's in there lol If it recovers all of them it will be worth every penny. If anyone loses any pics on a hard drive or a sd card im your man for the job of recovering them for a small fee lol

[20civic04]

off topic but are u on 7thgenhonda the name sounds familiar

[03civicdx]

Quote: Originally Posted by 20civic04

off topic but are u on 7thgenhonda the name sounds familiar

yes I am lol

[RTamer]

Try and get your hands on a program called Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional. I used it on a 320gb drive that was mechanically messed up and recovered everything except a couple of files. It takes a while! It won't be finished in an hour or so, so you need to plan some time for it. It scans the drive byte for byte, so as long as some other data was not written to that sector, you should get good results.

[03civicdx]

Quote: Originally Posted by RTamer

Try and get your hands on a program called Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional. I used it on a 320gb drive that was mechanically messed up and recovered everything except a couple of files. It takes a while! It won't be finished in an hour or so, so you need to plan some time for it. It scans the drive byte for byte, so as long as some other data was not written to that sector, you should get good results.

see my above post ^


Bought a program called getdata for $40.00 it found 2500 lost or deleted pics got the first cd burned and most of them are some I lost so that good but theres alot of random internet pics on there too from temp. internet files kinda odd I seen random sig's in there lol If it recovers all of them it will be worth every penny. If anyone loses any pics on a hard drive or a sd card im your man for the job of recovering them for a small fee lol

[Arfamo]

Quote: Originally Posted by 03civicdx

Bought a program called getdata for $40.00 it found 2500 lost or deleted pics got the first cd burned and most of them are some I lost so that good but theres alot of random internet pics on there too from temp. internet files kinda odd I seen random sig's in there lol If it recovers all of them it will be worth every penny. If anyone loses any pics on a hard drive or a sd card im your man for the job of recovering them for a small fee lol

Glad you got your photos back - the GetData product is a good one that I recommend.

As a note to others in a similar predicament - to increase the likelihood of being able to recover deleted photos, either on a PC or memory card, do not save any new files to the device.

That's probably not too difficult to manage in the case of a memory card.

In the case of a PC it means minimising disk activity - so don't use it to browse the internet downloading a ton of possible solutions! If you must, then at least use a different PC - then download any products onto a USB memory stick, plug that into the PC with the missing pictures and run it directly from the memory stick.

If you're stuck with no other option but the PC concerned, just do as little as possible with it. Browsing the net causes lots of little files to be saved to the main drive normally, so just beware, your search for the cheapest or free solution may be working against you, you're better off going with one good solution from the start.

You can find out more on how to recover deleted photos from a PC or memory card etc at http://www.RecoverDeletedPictures.com from where you can download a free trial version of the GetData photo recovery software that will scan and show you the files it finds in a preview window (you see a thumbnail image of those that can be recovered).

Hope that's helpful to folks.