help Restoring lost photos

Recuva
1

My situation:

Two days ago I was using Picassa (Goggle product)to move pictures from my memory card to my hard drive. I did not select the option to delete the pictures from my memory card. I have done this procedure with this product at least a thousand times. My pictures were both on the memory card and showing in all of my folders before this process started. And then they were gone. There were maybe 10 pictures on the memory card (not a big deal) and somewhere around 7500 pictures on my hard drive, give or take a couple. It was about a years worth of pictures.

The entire "my pictures" folder removed from the hard drive, not to be found again. I went through Picassa's forum and discovered that this has happened to other people, and thus have learned about Recuva.

Thus far I Have

1. received a mighty lecture from the husband about not backing up my files. He is a computer dude, and has given me the tools to do so. I just didn't know. So, I am on my own on this one.

2. at the recommendation of the dear husband, I have not used "that" computer for anything. (except for steps in trying to recover the pictures)

3. first run through of Recuva came back with 25000 images found (approximately)a lot of those were not .jps but other graphics that I am not concerned about, and most of the .jps' that did come back (I would guess at 90%) stated that they were irretrievable. (yet I could see the image, and that just bugs me.)

Here is what I am thinking, but I don't want to act without some guidance.

1. defrag the computer (even though it says it doesn't need it)

2. do an advanced search looking only for .jps (that is all that I shoot in, I haven't read anything about the file ext. being effected.

3. somewhere in my reading I saw something about "fat" and "NTSF" (I just made up those letters for the second one, because I haven't refound it) and that there is a better chance of being restored not in "Fat", I have no idea what that means, but do I want to try that?

4.How many times do I want to scan my system, is it okay to go with the big guns (35 times) or should I just start off wimpy and keep climbing up the ladder.

Any help would be appreciated.

Catherine

2

Hi Catherine, and welcome to Piriform.

I'm not an expert on recovering photos as I've never had to do it, but there are other guys on here who are more knowledgeable about recovering stuff than me.

That being said, I can tell you that you are doing right not to do anything on that drive which could overwrite the stuff you want to recover. Also recover when you eventually do, to a different drive.

Also, I would suggest not defragging. Leave the drive as it it.

What you can try is to set up Recuva as outlined in this previous post, and then after scanning you will be able to navigate to the folders containing the pics you want to restore, which is better than listing and trying to recover everything.

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=31183&view=findpost&p=186129

And I have found it pays to try and recover them in batches, and not all at once.

Firstly of course, set up Recuva as per that previous post, do a scan, and then come back and let us know how that turns out.

And don't forget, you may get other input here, when guys actually come on at different times. We're all over the planet. :)

Hope that helps for now, and the FAT and NTFS things are just different file systems. Camera cards are usually in the FAT format and hard drives NTFS, but you can copy from one to the other with no problems, so don't worry about that.

3

Well,

I managed to restore the few pictures from the media card. At least the two of them that were new. The rest are already out of my mind.

Now, I've gone in and changed the view from thumbnail to tree, clicked on restore folder structure

then, not really knowing what to do, I clicked the program off, logged it back on, the same screen came back up, so I just hit scan, and it gave me files, so at least know I have files,

...

So it seems that I can get some and not others...

Wondering how many I am actually losing or if it is just edits that I am losing...

4

It would be better if you could remove your drive and attach it to another pc as a secondary drive. This will keep it safe from all the stuff Windows does all the time. Tell/plead with your husband to help if necessary. Then install Recuva on the system drive and as Dennis says always recover to another drive.

I use Recuva in Advanced Mode, it's so much more flexible. After running a scan you can enter .jps in the Filename/Path box to show just those files. You can right-click on the display pane and change the view mode. I should ignore the state for the moment and recover all you can. Get the pics off the disk to a safe place and look at them later. You can recover a complete folder in Tree View - recover this as a sub-folder under some other known folder - if this looks advantageous.

Do not defrag under any circumstances.

There's no such thing as a 35-times scan. A scan will scan once. You can scan as many times as you want to. A scan scans all the disk: whatever you enter in the Filename or other selections will not require a rescan.

You can run a deep scan (in Options/Actions) which may produce more hits, but will take longer to run and process.

5

Assuming here Catherine, that you have stuff on that hard drive which has previously been deleted, and you don't want recovering, selecting "Tree View" in options gives you a window like this after scanning ...

... which gives you the ability to target only the files or folders you want to recover, and not lots of stuff you don't.

Selecting "Restore Folder Structure" will recover files (if recoverable) into the exact same folder structure they were in when they were deleted, although on another drive. In other words, you wouldn't have to do any sorting through possibly a lot of individual files.

6

I used the "restore folder structure" and the "tree view" and that has made a great difference. I couldn't remember how to get just .jpg to show up, but for the most part, that is what I got. I will be able to sort out the gibberish later, I would hope.

Getting the husband to move the hard drive to another computer wasn't going to happen, I know he can do it, I have seen him open up laptops and change out the drives, but...

I saved all of the pictures onto my backup drive (novel idea, I know). I have glanced into some of the folders and I am still getting a lot of "invalid images". I don't know if that is because they were from files that were edited and saved over, or if I just am not going to get them back.

Next, I am going to use my old laptop to go through my pictures and see what I have. I will be using my old computer, as it seems to be far more stable.

7

The "Invalid Image" issue you're finding may be down to Picassa also, but it's hard to tell at this stage ...

https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=481d12571b9751db&hl=en

I used to use that program, but I think I may just stay an ex user.

Let us know how you get on with recovering, or if you have any more queries. We may not be able to give you anything positive, but we'll try.