I was asked a question tonight by a friend of mine about recovering photos that were inadvertantly deleted from a PC. I looked around and found a couple of utilities that might do the trick, but I thought I would ask all of you if you have anything that you know works for recovering lost files. We know they are still there, in theory, we just need a way to identify them.
Any insight will be appreciated. Thanks!
There are some freeware file recovery utilities out there – a google search including “free” or “Freeware” should find them. A simple delete just changes the first bit (byte?) of the file so that it won’t show up. You replace that character and it will reappear. however, you want to stop using the drive that those files are stored on as much as possible. The space is flagged as free to overwrite so you could overwrite entries without meaning to. I know there was one utility that could be run remotely or from a disk – best way considering that you’re not installing something and potentially overwriting the disk space used by those files.
A quick search reveals that the number of free options to do this has grown quite a bit. With that being the case, I couldn’t even begin to pick just one to start with. As long as you didn’t run the drive through a file “shredder” or defragment the drive, you should be in pretty good shape with just about any of the solutions around.
I’ve had good luck with “recover my files” from http://www.recovermyfiles.com/ – it even got data back from a drive that had lost it’s partition table! The directory structure was lost, so now I get to sort through thousands of files, but at least I’ve got ‘em back.
I’ve used PC Inspector and been really happy. It’s a free download from pcinspector.de
My dear wife is much relieved now that most of her pictures are restored. I used PC Inspector File Recovery. For this issue, it worked splendidly. And you can’t beat the price.
Thank you for all the suggestions.
And thank you, Jim, for the constant updates through the day.