Newbie and I need help fast

Ok, so I know I have messed up big time. I have been having some problems with my gateway computer. I called gateway and they had me do a system restore. I was told that none of my PAYROLL would be affected. Well guess what? My payroll information for the past 5 years have been deleted and I am not sure what I should be doing. I have run the recuva and found thousands of files which is great, but I dont know how to get them where they can be used again. I have tried saving them to a CD with no success.. Anyone out there that can help me, I would be greatful because I have to get payroll done by this Tuesday Morning...

Thanks a bunch for any and all help

Stacey

Have a read here Stacey for now.

http://docs.piriform.com/recuva/using-recu...ring-your-files

Someone else may chime in with more specific info for you.

P.S. Hope you are successful :)

Ok, so lets see if I have this straight....after the scan runs, all of the files I highlight will be recovered? It will ask me where to save to...will I save to C drive (local Disk) or D drive (Recovery)? Or is there someplace else? Maybe a CD? and once that is done, do I just click on the icon to see if they are recovered?

I should save them to a flash drive, or another external drive. It's the safest thing to do. If you have a d partition then that will do, assuming the payroll stuff lives, or lived, on the c drive. Saving to a cd means that they have to be written to cdr, and Recuva won't do that. I guess that a large file will be created somewhere ready to be written to cd, and that is bad news, as it will overwrite space on the disk that might, and quite possibly does, hold the files you're trying to recover.

Stop everything on your pc except running Recuva, and recover files to a separate device.

Ok, so I dont have any other drives other than C or D, then I need to go purchase a flash Drive?

In my opinion that would be the safest bet. If you have any idea of the size of the files you want to recover then you can get a drive to suit. Itis not gb's of stuff, is it? Get one as large as you can. It helps to have a friend who can dump the stuff from the flash drive to cdr for you, then you can recover a gretaer amount of data.

Thanks for all the help but forgive me for not knowing what all this means....cdr = CD writeable?

Yep. It probably stands for cd recordable, but the end result is the same.

So what if I dont have anyone that can put this information on a CD? Can I still use it?? If so how would I do this?

Stacey go and buy yourself a flash drive (or thumb drive or usb stick or memory stick or whatever it is you call them in your neck of the woods) then all you need to do is put it in your usb port, look in 'my computer' to see which drive letter windows has given it, and then tell recuva to recover your documents to it.

Once again thank all of you for all of your help and that comes from the heart..I have a flash drive plugged in the usb and they are being recovered...thanks again

As you all can tell I dont know very much about computers. Just enough to get me in trouble...hence where I am today. I have my files on the flash drive and I have went to the program icon to see if I could find them. I cant...do I need to send the files from the flash drive to where the files were located © drive?

There is more information here than I even thought was possible...I will have to try to get these files a little at a time and burn to CDR and hope that works if not then I will just have lost them.