Desperate help for lost files

[tackdriver]

I am in desperate need of help. I had two folders on my desktop. They had some duplicate files but also many different. I deleted the one folder. It deleted EVERYTHING from BOTH files, Pix, files everything. It even deleted the folders I had in my external hard drive and SD card that I had backed up just in case, all the files from the good folder I wanted to save. I have Recua and it saved some but now they are in a mess.

Will system restore help or taking the computer in to a professional help? These files are VERY important and that's why I had backed them up in two separate spots

I am in shock and have no idea what to do

Why would it delete from my backup drive and SD card both wrer plugged in at the time
????

[Dubious_Beans]

Did you look for them in the recycle bin?

[tackdriver]

Yes, it said the files were too big and permanently deleted. Do you think I can use my back up to restore?

[twidget1995]

They aren't gone unless you've written over the HDD sectors where the data is.

There are programs you can use such as get data back (https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm) I've used this program successfully several times in the past to get people's data back. Well worth the investment.

If you need help, pm me. I have an older copy but it should still work.

[tackdriver]

Can you tell me if it will restore the files the same as before they were deleded? I have Recuva but it brought back so mcu crap and jumbled everything so it will take me a week ti figure it out

[Creampuff]

The more you use the drive the more chance you stand of overwriting the original file. Don't go installing more recovery programs on the same drive your files reside on

Did recuva give you the same jumbled results from the SD card as your external ?

[stilly]

The more you use the drive the more chance you stand of overwriting the original file. Don't go installing more recovery programs on the same drive your files reside on

Did recuva give you the same jumbled results from the SD card as your external ?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

YES! STOP USING THAT DRIVE.

Mr Driver. There are several things you can and should do. The thing you should NOT do is take your comp to a "pro" that will charge you bookoo bucks when you can quite possibly do it yourself for 1/10th the price.

First you need to know how hard drives work. They work by getting formatted (they are like big patches of asphalt and they need data parked on them, so they need stripes to park the data) and formatting them means painting parking lines on them. Once you have the parking spaces, you can park a piece of data into each space, or rather a file or a PART of a file into each space, but you may NOT park more than ONE piece of data into that space. If you happen to somehow do that, you get what is known as a cross-linked file and then that file is jacked.

When you delete files, your hard drive takes the FIRST letter of the filename and tosses it and marks it for deletion so at ANY time a new file or part of a file can come in and park in that space and only then does that old file get deleted off the drive.

SO STOP using that drive, stop WRITING to it and stop using it PERIOD. If you can, take it OUT of the computer because you should get a cradle at this point and run your program for data recovery on that.

How good is data recovery? I bought a "NEW" drive off ebay and ended up finding over a million files on it before it was just partitioned and formatted over. I STILL sort through some of those files, but I have some VERY cool reading materials on lawful signal interception from the Telco companies and the FBI in SEVERAL countries...

Back to your issue, you know it is jacked for sure, and you can probably do this on your own and only lose a few files MAYBE, but I do not think system restore will save them unless you had it already turned on and had it taking up plenty of space. But keep in mind, I THINK system restore typically does not back up data, just SYSTEM files and folders. I think there is another type of backup that saves VERSIONS of files automatically, but if you do NOT have a file, then do NOT go create it again.

SOME people try to do that for some STUPID reason- do NOT go make folders named the SAME name as the ones you deleted. You will REALLY **** things up then.

The next thing to do is to run your recuva program and let it do its thing and restore all of the files/folders to a CLEAN external drive (Yes, go OUT and go buy a seagate external drive or WD drive just for this recovery process) and then you can have a CLEAN drive to COPY restored files to. Then you will need to rename most of your files if not all of them prolly because of the first letter thing.

Recova aint too bad, but there is also a cool program called: EaseUS Data Recovery and also Ontrack data recovery that were both pretty decent. ONE grabbed folders and restored the folders that were lost. The other grabbed raw files. What you will want to do is to run several recoveries and save all of the files to different folder names for each run. Yeah you will end up with duplicate files, but sometimes a file is read easier one way than another and it may or may not be corrupted in one folder but will be garbage in two other folders...

There is also this program: http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download_pro.php

WORST case scenario, before you send your drive to a "pro" fessional rip-off place like best buy or whatever, I would be willing to take a shot at getting your data back. You would need to PM me, but I am not in SD, I am about an hour and a half away. Worse case, you would have some of your data back and still need to go look for someone else to get the rest, but if I can't find those files, it is going to cost a LOT of money for someone else to do it. But whatever works for you. I have the tools and about 10+ different programs that I can unleash and some of them are LEO/FBI quality... Heh, how else did I find the files leftover on that drive from ebay...

[Dragunov]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

YES! STOP USING THAT DRIVE.

Mr Driver. There are several things you can and should do. The thing you should NOT do is take your comp to a "pro" that will charge you bookoo bucks when you can quite possibly do it yourself for 1/10th the price.

First you need to know how hard drives work. They work by getting formatted (they are like big patches of asphalt and they need data parked on them, so they need stripes to park the data) and formatting them means painting parking lines on them. Once you have the parking spaces, you can park a piece of data into each space, or rather a file or a PART of a file into each space, but you may NOT park more than ONE piece of data into that space. If you happen to somehow do that, you get what is known as a cross-linked file and then that file is jacked.

When you delete files, your hard drive takes the FIRST letter of the filename and tosses it and marks it for deletion so at ANY time a new file or part of a file can come in and park in that space and only then does that old file get deleted off the drive.

SO STOP using that drive, stop WRITING to it and stop using it PERIOD. If you can, take it OUT of the computer because you should get a cradle at this point and run your program for data recovery on that.

How good is data recovery? I bought a "NEW" drive off ebay and ended up finding over a million files on it before it was just partitioned and formatted over. I STILL sort through some of those files, but I have some VERY cool reading materials on lawful signal interception from the Telco companies and the FBI in SEVERAL countries...

Back to your issue, you know it is jacked for sure, and you can probably do this on your own and only lose a few files MAYBE, but I do not think system restore will save them unless you had it already turned on and had it taking up plenty of space. But keep in mind, I THINK system restore typically does not back up data, just SYSTEM files and folders. I think there is another type of backup that saves VERSIONS of files automatically, but if you do NOT have a file, then do NOT go create it again.

SOME people try to do that for some STUPID reason- do NOT go make folders named the SAME name as the ones you deleted. You will REALLY **** things up then.

The next thing to do is to run your recuva program and let it do its thing and restore all of the files/folders to a CLEAN external drive (Yes, go OUT and go buy a seagate external drive or WD drive just for this recovery process) and then you can have a CLEAN drive to COPY restored files to. Then you will need to rename most of your files if not all of them prolly because of the first letter thing.

Recova aint too bad, but there is also a cool program called: EaseUS Data Recovery and also Ontrack data recovery that were both pretty decent. ONE grabbed folders and restored the folders that were lost. The other grabbed raw files. What you will want to do is to run several recoveries and save all of the files to different folder names for each run. Yeah you will end up with duplicate files, but sometimes a file is read easier one way than another and it may or may not be corrupted in one folder but will be garbage in two other folders...

There is also this program: http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download_pro.php

WORST case scenario, before you send your drive to a "pro" fessional rip-off place like best buy or whatever, I would be willing to take a shot at getting your data back. You would need to PM me, but I am not in SD, I am about an hour and a half away. Worse case, you would have some of your data back and still need to go look for someone else to get the rest, but if I can't find those files, it is going to cost a LOT of money for someone else to do it. But whatever works for you. I have the tools and about 10+ different programs that I can unleash and some of them are LEO/FBI quality... Heh, how else did I find the files leftover on that drive from ebay...

^^^ This!^^^. Might I suggest never making folders with the same name, and when you make backups, unplugging your media before deleting anything in the future.

[tackdriver]

^^^ This!^^^. Might I suggest never making folders with the same name, and when you make backups, unplugging your media before deleting anything in the future.

Now ya tell me. Yes, that must be what happened. The two folders were similar in name. Still, it's unbelievable. As usual, thanks everyone, I PM'd
Stilly

On these other recovery programs, can you tell me if, when it recovers, what is shown? What I mean is, in my folder I had hundreds of photos. Groups in separate folders labeled Jan, Feb.etc. With recover, it brought back the pics, but not in their folders. Theyre all in one big mess. The same with some of my letters. They were in folders like Smith Letter, Sears Letter etc. But Recuvva brought back the letters but they are all named the same.... as "letter" This will take me weeks to sort out.
Is this how the other programs would recover the files?

[tackdriver]

On t

[stilly]

Different programs recover things differently.

Some can do a light scan and bring back folders like a REALLY cool program called UNDLETE from Norton/Symantec that I used a long time ago. It worked great, but that program is hard to find today for obvious SEARCHING reasons. I might have it archived. Then other programs go a little deeper and find folders with files in them, but maybe they find the files because they are just looking for files and fragments and they typically will be geared towards the end user and ask what TYPE of file you are searching for and then dump every possible recoverable GIF or JPG or DOC into a fileheap for you to sort through. Then there are programs that will examine the FAT and pull up EVERY file and bit of data they can find at the cluster/sector level and sometimes you get a bunch of ground beef, sometimes you get diamonds. All depends on the level of expertise used, the time spent and the data being old or new.

All kinds of factors.

[djhall]

DO NOT do a system restore. The only files rolled back are system files. There is zero chance a system restore will recover any files. It is almost certain a system restore will make some currently recoverable files permanently recoverable.

There is a related feature that might help. There is a Windows feature that may or not have been enabled on your drive which dedicates a percentage of it's space to storing previous versions of your files. If it was enabled then you may be able to go to the parent folder of the missing folders, right click on it, and select the option to restore previous versions.

Again though, doing anything that writes data to the drive risks permanent loss of files that may otherwise be recoverable. The safest way to do this is by cloning the drive and performing the operation on the clone, but that is a big task for someone who has never done it before.

Sent from my Moto G (4) using Tapatalk

[Creampuff]

I'm a bit lost here. You had 3 folders. The main one on your desktop, and then a backup on the external and another backup on the SD card. And recuva showed all 3 folders had the same garbled mess? Are you sure you haven't run recuva individually on the SD card and on the external drive?

It's also odd that all 3 would get deleted at the same time. Are you running a backup program in the background that mirrors write and deletions? I was wondering if you had a RAID configuration going but it would be unusual to RAID an external drive.

Also flip the little switch on the SD card to make it read only, just to lessen the chance of anymore writes onto the SD card.

[djhall]

^^^ This!^^^. Might I suggest never making folders with the same name, and when you make backups, unplugging your media before deleting anything in the future.

Now ya tell me. Yes, that must be what happened. The two folders were similar in name. Still, it's unbelievable. As usual, thanks everyone, I PM'd
Stilly

On these other recovery programs, can you tell me if, when it recovers, what is shown? What I mean is, in my folder I had hundreds of photos. Groups in separate folders labeled Jan, Feb.etc. With recover, it brought back the pics, but not in their folders. Theyre all in one big mess. The same with some of my letters. They were in folders like Smith Letter, Sears Letter etc. But Recuvva brought back the letters but they are all named the same.... as "letter" This will take me weeks to sort out.
Is this how the other programs would recover the files?

As someone explained before, the way Windows "deletes" a file is by getting rid of information from the index that tracks where the file is stored on the drive, what it's name is, what folder it belongs inside of, etc. The file data itself isn't destroyed or altered until something else is written over it.

A simple deleted file recovery will just look at the index for entries marked as deleted. In that case you might get back files like _eallyImportandLetter.docx. But there aren't index entries hanging around for every deleted file and folder that has ever existed on your drive. So a more thorough file recovery will look at the contents of the areas without matching index entries and say, "well, this looks like a complete word document with no index entry to explain what it was, where it was, what it was named, or when it was deleted, but I could create one for it and call it Letter1.docx.

That style recovery has the best chance of getting back the most data possible, but what you need will most likely have to be sorted from a mountain of stuff you don't.

Sent from my Moto G (4) using Tapatalk

[Mute]

Stop using the drive and don't do a system restore. The big question is are these files important enough to warrant spending money for recovery. If so, your best bet is to actually pay for a professional date recovery service.