Lost photo's...good news

Wife made a big boob today......she says she was just in photo smart essentials deleting a few bits and has deleted ALL the photo's in there ie a LOT now also when we just go to 'pictures ' in windows there seems to be 2% of the photo folders that usually appear again a lot of pictures....................any ideas would be a life saver.........ie hers :evil:

Don't use that hard disk right now. Anything you do can overwrite them. I'm typing an edit to help you recover them, but that could take 10-15 minutes.

What OS are you using? XP? vista? Win7?

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EDIT : okay. So ...

It shouldn't be that hard if you follow this step by step. When in doubt, PM me your Skype address. I can walk you through it.

First thing to do is get recovery software. I'm a big fan of Piriform's Recuva, so I'll use that for this tutorial.
Go to THIS PAGE and download the Portable version (the middle one). Download it TO ANOTHER HARD DISK OR A USB STICK, but not to the disk that your photos were on.

Extract the zip. In the Recuva folder (rcsetup143 for the current version) you'll find 2 applications : Recuva and Recuva64. The regular one is for 32bit systems, the 64 one for 64bit systems.
Open the one that suits your PC best. When in doubt, open the regular one ("Recuva").

Once it starts, you can select what kind of files you wish to recover. (pictures, music, etc). Select pictures.

Next it'll ask where. If you use the regular "Pictures" folder or anywhere in "My Documents", click the "My Documents" option.
Otherwise choose the bottom option and select the appropriate hard disk.

On the next screen, Recuva will ask if you want to do a deep scan. You don't have to use the Deepscan option, but chances are you won't find too many pictures.
If you find them, go to the 2nd to last part. If not, close Recuva, launch it again and repeat the whole thing with Deepscan enabled.
Mind you, depending on the size of your hard drive it could take hours to do a deep scan.


The last bit will be less specific because I haven't had to recover files in a while, and certainly not with the current version of Recuva.




Once it's done with the scan, you should see thumbnails. Select the ones you want to recover, and let Recuva save them TO A DIFFERENT DISK OR USB STICK.
(sorry for the caps, but I can't stress that enough. If you don't do that, you may overwrite several pictures with the recovered ones)

Once that's done, you should have them back.
Browse through the pictures one by one, to ensure that they are ok. Sometimes a file can be partly overwritten, resulting in a corrupted picture, or one that won't open. Those will be lost forever.

hi XP...

all understood will let u know how it goes

hi managed to find a fair few and saved to different drive ie external device, but tried to open in picture gallery but said ' file format not recognised '

In that case they must be corrupted already. How personal are they? I wouldn't mind trying to repair a few, to see if I can find a solution. I'll PM you my email address.

Cheers, the wife paniced and did a system restore straight after loosing them..........would this have made things worse ? it looks like it has only recoverd a small amount.......not worth having unless could get 90% back to be honest............ah well 5 years worth of photo's ...holidays... day out...cycle pics and motorbike pics........ :?

wouldi be right in saying if most were stored in photsmart and deleted from there, they are well gone and the stuff we had in ' pictures' ( which as less) are just corrupted now

A system restore can indeed overwrite the space that was previously used by those pictures.

Did you let Recuva do a deep scan? If not, that might help a bit.

If you did, I am still willing to help but would need access to the disk itself. Considering the distance between us, that would involve taking the hard disk out of the PC and sending it my way, which will put you without a PC for at least a week ... without any real guarantee of success.
I have plenty of tools and quite a bit of knowledge when it comes to these things, but I'm no magician.

Well, there's always a lesson to be learnt from such things. Always keep a backup. It may not help you in this case, but it might save any pictures you take from now on.

It is unlikely you have lost much at all if you did not use the machine a lot after the initial 'deletion'.

A system restore would not wipe them.

If there was no hardware failure you should be able to retrieve practically all the data.

Given you are suggesting there is a lot there that was not backed up it may be worth getting a local IT guy involved.

Software based recovery is a lot cheaper than hardware.

Some useful info here...

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Toolsata_Recovery