CCleaner destroyed my friend's Jpegs

[JoMilton]

I put CCleaner on my friend's pc, running Windows XP Home edition, the same as mine. I've used it for a few years with no problems.

She uses her pc with her Canon digital camera and had a huge batch of photos from a Society wedding in London. Having spent hours working on the pictures she tried to burn them to a cd, but it had a bad block and could not be used. So much for cheap cds. So she powered down and left the computer for a while.

I logged on on her id, surfed for a few hours, then ran CCleaner and powered down again. Next time she went to view her file of photos all the JPegs were unopenable. The information they contained had been wiped out by CCleaner. I know that because I reran the sequence of events about ten times with a spare folder of photos. If you prepare to burn photos to cd by right clicking the file and selecting "send to cd" but don't complete the operation and then run CCleaner it wipes out the information contained in the jpegs. Even if you delete the "files waiting to be burned".

I am almost pc illiterate - female aged 48, can't even operate a vcr. Probably you are going to tell me that I should have unticked a certain box on CCleaner. Which one? The problem wasn't discovered for three weeks because my friend has been away, and I've run CCleaner many times since then on the pc with level one scrambling, so I don't know if even a data recovery expert could get back the missing info. I may have cost my friend a lot of potential customers and have certainly caused her huge embarrassment because she cannot deliver the goods as promised, so I'm very unhappy and her feelings are unprintable.

My brother in law has often warned me of the consequences of using programs I don't understand. He was right!

[rridgely]

Oh wow, this sucks.

I really hope your friend hasn't deleted all the pics yet. First lets make sure they really are corrupted. Download the below program on to their pc:

http://www.filehippo.com/download_faststone_image_viewer/

 

Its just a small photo viewer program. See if you can open the pictures with it.

Let me know how it goes.

[JoMilton]

Oh wow, this sucks.

I really hope your friend hasn't deleted all the pics yet. First lets make sure they really are corrupted. Download the below program on to their pc:

http://www.filehippo.com/download_faststone_image_viewer/

 

Its just a small photo viewer program. See if you can open the pictures with it.

Let me know how it goes.

Thank you for your reply. I have downloaded this program and had a quick look. I don't do image stuff, so I have no experience of using this sort of program. It is showing the affected pictures with big red x's and can't open them. The pc knows the size of the picture in kb but has no information as to the dimensions, ie 100 X 200 which shows on unaffected jpegs. Recuva couldn't get them back either. I think they are gone for good. So will CCleaner be. I will be uninstalling it from my friend's pc as she won't use it any more so it's a waste of hard drive space. I just wish I knew which tick box on CCleaner could be unticked to stop this happening again.

[MikeW]

I am a semi pro photographer and use Canon equipment. If you would like to post one of the photo files to me in a PM I would be happy to check it over to see if it can be recovered. Or, send me a PM and I will give you my e-mail and you can send a sample that way.

[hazelnut]

Perhaps they got classed as temp files as they were stranded in no mans land while waiting to be rewritten to cd.

 

try this

 

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-U...storation.shtml

 

I know someone who recovered jpegs using this free software. Wish you luck.

 

Not a good time to say this I know, but PLEASE back up important info like this daily.

P.S. Just seen Mike's post, another option for you.