dumb newbie question

[dusty2008]

I just noticed today that I lost a mega-ton of music, photos, documents, etc. because I somehow accidently deleted a bunch of stuff.

 

I thought I saw that I had 2 DOCUMENTS folders (in which I put some emails that contained music, photo's etc.) so I ignorantly deleted one and later emptied my Recycle Bin.

 

I Googled. Installed Recuva, read the online help but don't really and truly understand too much. I am in deep doo-doo and need lots of good sound advice. Give me all you've got please.

 

In addition to whatever you kind people advise and recommend, etc., how much time do I have to get all this lost valuable data?

 

 

Gratefully,

 

Dumb Newbie

 

PS: I've had CCleaner forever and I LOVE IT!!!

 

PIRIFORM ROCKS!!!

[Augeas]

Do as little as possible on the drive that held the files, preferrably nothing. Open Recuva and run a scan on the correct drive, which may well be the c drive if you only have one. Look for the files you want to recover. You can sort the scan results by name or path etc. Files deleted from the recycler may be renamed to Dcxx.ext in XP and to $Rxxxxx.ext in Vista. If you find anything recover it to another drive, a flash drive will do.

 

If you have deleted a lot of stuff then it will take several hours to find and recover it, if it can be found. There isn't any guarantee that you will find or be able to recover anything.

 

Good sound advice would be to take a backup occasionally, but that was only valid up to yesterday.

[siborg69]

I'm gonna jump on this thread as i'm also a newbie......I had some problem with my external hard drive. VLC player froze when i was watching a movie, the computer was being really slow so i just restarted the thing. when it all booted up again, all of the data on my external hard drive was gone (about 300gb). it still comes up in device manager and disk management but now when i click on it to open it, it says "the hard drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?"/ ive clicked no to this. im thinking about trying recuva to see what i can get back but there are two problems. the first, that im not the best with computers really! secondly, if recuva is easy to use (as it seems to be from what ive read) and it can find my files, i dont have anywhere else to save the 300gb of stuff to.....any advice onwhat to do???? i could cry after losing all that stuff.......

[Augeas]

Well, look on the bright side, you are at the vanguard of digital use. Large hard drive, huge storage of films, music and photos, no backups, and reliance on a medium that cannot even come close to the storage life of paper, film, photgraphic prints, or good old LP's. Add to that the difficulty and complexity of recovering from digital data loss, and we are looking at what will be an increasingly common problem.

 

I don't really know what advice to give you. If you want to attempt to recover your data then you must have some other storage medium. How much spare space do you have on your c drive? If you have sufficient (20 to 50 gb) then you may be able to postpone getting another ext hard drive, for the time being anyway.

 

Install Recuva on your c drive. Run it against your external drive to see what you find. Try a normal scan with the Scan for Non-Deleted Files option chosen, which should be relatively fast. If you find anything you want to recover then recover it to the c drive. After each recovery write the file to cd/dvd and delete it. Continue this way until you have recovered all you can, and written a huge pile of dvd's.

 

If Recuva normal scan does not find much, or anything, then try a deep scan. This will take many hours and (should) produce a huge list of files. It is not an easy job to find and recover files in this way, you just have to plug away at it.

 

In the future, whan you have a new ext disk? Burn photos to cd's, preferrably two copies. Burn films to dvd's, but they're not so personal and can be replaced. Burn music to cd's, but the same applies as with films. Or get another 300 gb disk and some imaging software and make a backup shadow disk, but it won't be so secure as those bits of paper.

[mino2003]

I'm another newbie with a major problem. We had trouble connecting to the Internet. Hubby dearest tried to do what he could. While I was out at the store he decided to use the HP recovery discs to fix the problem. We can connect to the Internet great now, but he lost all of my documents (including all of my school documents and records). Can Recuva restore my documents or is all lost for good. I don't want to try it, if it will not work. I don't want to cause more problems.

[Andavari]

Can Recuva restore my documents or is all lost for good. I don't want to try it, if it will not work. I don't want to cause more problems.

Since that HP recovery most likely didn't securely wipe the hard disk you'll most likely be able to recover some of your stuff, however a deep scan may be necessary. View the Recuva documentation site for more info on its usage.