Accidentally deleted my files

attackingmooseattackingmoose
edited April 2007 in Hardware
Vista (being a piece of ****) decided to delete my files.

I was running low on space and it gave me the 'HAY, we can tell you how to clean up space by running this program' so I clicked that, deleted what I THOUGHT were temp files and it turned out to be _my_ files. I _just_ emptied the recycling bin to find out that all the files were dumped there.

So the recovery process _should_ be really painless since this happened less than an hour ago and the harddrive was relatively clean before. I just don't know which program to use :|

Any help will be much appreciated.

Also - if wrong section, sorry. Forum layout got changed around again :|

Comments

  • JokkeJokke Bergen, Norway Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    I think I remember that Tuneup Utilities had that function, and a lot of other handy tools too. What I DON'T remember is wheter you have to pay for it or not.
  • CycloniteCyclonite Tampa, Florida Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    Word of advice: don't store stuff in the recycle bin. You wouldn't throw that important client folder sitting on your desk in the trash can at work would you? ;)
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    Drive Rescue is a freeware tool that I have had good success with in the past. Yes it's support the NTFS file system is "incomplete" but it has worked ok for me on several machines :)

    The other options will have cost involved unfortunately :(

    GetDataBack for NTFS is very good and not too pricey :)
  • attackingmooseattackingmoose
    edited April 2007
    I got GetDataBack but it only allows you to install it on the drive you want to store files on, not the one you want to recover from. So I'm sort of SOL because I have one drive and only one drive.

    And since this is a laptop, it makes this whole thing a bit harder.

    But, I have the program.
  • TansunnTansunn
    edited April 2007
    Most recovery software I've seen requires a second disc to write the recovered files to to keep from overwriting the "available" space that's actually occupied by deleted files, so you might want to (or maybe even have to) invest in an external USB drive or thumb drive.
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    Thumb drive would do the job as Tansunn right states :)
  • attackingmooseattackingmoose
    edited April 2007
    Shorty wrote:
    Thumb drive would do the job as Tansunn right states :)

    I would need a lot of pretty big thumb drives to recover all my files if I did it that way.

    I'm just going to say sod it and get an external hdd, I've been meaning to do it anyway.

    Thanks for the replies, you guys are keeping me from throwing this thing out the window.
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    I have had one for years, they are a life saver sometimes!

    We try, we try. Computers are damn frustrating sometimes :mad:
  • attackingmooseattackingmoose
    edited April 2007
    Got the external, loaded getdataback and ran it, I had used another program before and recovered some files...to that harddrive, so I lost a lot of ground already.

    But I managed to recover a lot of my 'files I can't get back' (personal pictures, and such). BUT - they won't open. They have all been 'corrupted'. The file sizes are what they should be but they won't open.

    Is there a way to fix that or recover certain data? I have all the codecs (they would open nicely before).

    If not, then I'm going to try to put winXP on the laptop. I hate Vista even more after using it.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    No, there's no way you can recover it. The data was destroyed when you recovered to the partition you were attempting to recover.
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