Okay, I seem to be really confused right now.
I've been up all night trying to find programs to recover these folders that were deleted yesterday.
I didn't mean to delete them, and I'm having trouble on getting them back.
I've download about three other programs but I can't seem to get them to work.
And I downloaded this one, and files are coming up, but when I try to get one I want, I'll try to save it, but it won't.
It'll say "Do You Want To Restore To The Same Drive? (This Can Reduce The Chance Of A SucessFul Recovery.)"
And I click yes, and when I click to see the picture, it says "No Preview Is Available".
I'm getting on confused on how to do this.
I want to get back about two folders full of important pictures/doucuments.
But I need help on getting them back.
Help me please?

Hi Chrissy,
After you Recover the file are you going to where you saved the new copy of the picture?
For example I click on a file and then right click and select Recover Highlighted then you get the message you described then you get to select where you want the copy of the deleted file to be "saved".Are you looking there to find your "recovered" picture?
Hope this helps,
davey

Yes, I tried.
I right clicked it and selected Recover Highlighted.
I wanted to save it to the desktop, so I "saved" it there.
And when I went to look at the picture, it wasn't available.

Doesn't sound too good.Don't lose hope yet. Are you getting Previews of any of your pictures before selecting?
I am asking because others may need to know this and any other details you can provide.
In the past some files were considered "poor" or whatever but if you tried to recover them they were OK. Others marked "good" were not recoverable.The only scary thing right now is how recently those files were created.The older the better chance of recovery.
Are you using Vista or what OS ?
I have to go right now but keep trying to recover what you can NOW !!! The more you use your PC the greater chance of losing them.
Best wishes,
davey
I put mine in My Pictures.I don't have an alternative drive either.

P.S. Turn off anything that may automatically start-up like programs,messages and scheduled updates etc.

No I'mnot.
And when I recover them, they don't show any previews either.
They were deleted sometime yesterday afternoon.
So do you think I could still get them back?

Hi again Chrissy,
Have you tried "Deep Scan" also.

As for possible recovery it really depends on where they were and how much you used your PC since then.
I assume all you have is the C drive and they were not on another drive possibly.

We need some more advice from other members.

davey

P.S. I have only personally recovered "Pictures" not Folders with pictures and or Documents.
I will be looking into to this also.Hope we get some more advice.
If you have Vista you may be be able to Restore those files also that way.
What OS etc are you using?

Welcome to Piriform Chrissy.


How did you actually delete these folders by just highlighting them and pressing the Delete button or did you hold down the Shift key and press the Delete button?

Now I didn't think that Recuva could recover completely deleted folder. I know its great on files in a folder so I've just done a little experiment. I made a folder on my C:\ called A and copied 420 files in 23 sub folder into A folder. Highlighted A folder and pressed the Delete key.

I did a scan with Recuva but nothing showed up relating to the deleted folder or the recycle bin. I restored folder A out of the recycle bin and did another scan. This time it picked up on the files I had just restored from the recycle bin. I can still recover all these files from the recycle bin because No overwritten clusters were detected.

I then deleted A again but this time I held the Shift key down so the files and folder didn't go into the recycle bin and I did another scan. This time instead of showing C:\A\foldername it just showed C:\ \foldername, foldername being the names of the 23 sub folders in folder A. These files could be recovered.

I made the same A folder gain and copied the same files into that folder. I held the Shift key down and pressed the delete key again. I did another scan but the C:\ \foldername doesn't show up this time.

Now an hard drive is like a library that stores thousands of books. In a computers case its files and folders are bookshelves. A lot of people don't known, but when we delete a file from a computer in fact it isn't really deleted. The operating system simply removes it from the file list and makes the space the file was using available for new data to be written. In other words, the operating system doesn't "zero" (i.e. doesn't clean) the space the file was using.

The operating system acts like that in order to save time. Imagine a large file that occupies lots of sectors on the hard drive. To really delete this file from the disk the operating system would have to fill with zeros (or any other value) all sectors occupied by this file. This could take a lot of time. Instead, it simply removes the file name from the directory where the file is located and mark the sectors the file used as available space.

Now providing you haven't overwritten where that file/folder used to be then Recuva has a good chance to recover the files in tact.

Hi Chrissy,
Keith's reply just reminded me to ask a stupid question.
Your files wouldn't luckily still be in the Recycle bin?Maybe .I hope.
davey

Thats why I asked how she deleted these folders. Hoping they would go into the recycle bin.

No there not, they were deleted somehow.
I deleted the flies/folders by dragging them into the bin, and then deleting them.

Hi Chrissy,
IF you are using Vista you have a good chance of using System Restore from a date and time just prior to when you deleted them.
I meant to warn you to check back here.Don't wait on e-mail as it sometimes gets put into your spam mail or junk mail.
If you are not using Vista the chances go way down as far as System Restore but why not try anyhow.
If you have not been using your PC that is good.
I don't remember you saying if you could see any previews of your pictures.
If these files and pictures were created recently they may have been overwritten right away.
Do you possibly have any back-up files that may be still around?

Best wishes ,
davey

P.S. Recuva can sometimes be used to recover pictures from your camera storage device.
Just trying to give you every opportunity that I can think of.

This is probably academic now, especially after the 'download about three other programs'.

I'm a little confused. If you delete to the recycle bin and then empty the bin Windows will rename the files to something like dc1.nnn (I'm not too sure, but I think they begin with dc). So you could look for those with Recuva. I wouldn't use a deep scan yet, due to the time it takes.

But you say that you have tried to recover some of the missing files. How did you find them if they have been renamed? Pwerhaps you were trying to recover older versions, or overwritten sectors.

It looks like a lot of activity has gone on on your pc in the last 10 days, so recovery chances are slim. Always do as little as possible, including booting up, and try to recover to a flash drive. And ask an old bloke about the days of backups.

Nope, not using Vista.
I'm using XP.
And I had tried to use System Restore.
When I did it, I logged back on after restarting and saw the folders.
I clicked into them and saw nothing there. So I'm confused on what happens.
And I probably don't have any backup files either.
=/



And when I did the scan, I named my files/pictures the day they were taken and found some that were from May that I had deleted that day with all the other files. So I don't know. But yeah, it's been a bit.
I don't know if they will recover. Still bums me out a lot.

Sorry Chrissy,
Recuva finds and gives what it can. The proof is in the trying to use what is recovered. In this case it was gone.
Did you get to "recover" anything ? Any of the data files ?
At least now you have Recuva already installed and ready to use.Just in case.
davey