Desperate help needed

[jaguar982]

I have been trusted to take wedding/holiday pics off a computer which i did by cutting and pasting onto a memory stick and yes the stick has 3.8g of info i cant access now copied files back onto desktop i am willing to pay for recovery if anybody can help im in manchester and ive read up on recovery methods but its too important to cock up ...and i havnt told him yet thanks in advance

jag

[Over Carl]

Lets see - you had 3.8g of info you cut and paste to your desktop which you can't access?

What do you get when you try to open a pic? Can you see the folder with proper file names inside it?

[jessic4]

I can recommend someone who doesn't rip you off. PM me and I will send you their email address assuming I can find their email from work tomorrow. I warn you now though, I sent my 1TB WD drive after trying to cancel a bulk copy and corrupted the drive. I lost the vast majority of my lifetime collection of pictures since secondary school. Devastating but fortunately i have been backing up most pictures even on at least FB for some time. It cost me a swap of some gaming peripherals i had spare at work probably £100 or so's worth. Worth a shot although unsure what recovery chances are on USB.

[muttleymacclad]

What info can you see on the memory stick? If you can see there is 3.8gb of info what type of info is it? If you've copied and pasted this info then you must be able to access it.

What format were the files in originally?

mml

[jaguar982]

Had 3.8g on hard drive cut and pasted onto memory stick so not available on hard drive unless recovered and now on usb stick and also copied back onto desktop when i look at properties it says type of file file and the folders just look like a picture with 6 icons on it sorry for bad description

jag

[dpSparhawk]

You Cut and Pasted? Ouch, NEVER cut and paste Jag. Always Copy and paste, verify the data on the stick/backup drive, then copy it onto something else (another backup location). Verify the data there. Once you have it verified that you can access it both on the memory stick and a secondary backup location (even a tertiary one), then it's generally safe to delete them from the original source.

Can I ask what was the reason for moving them off the original computer, and did you check to make sure they were actually accessible prior to moving them?

The original computer doesn't have a virus does it? If so, is it Cryptlocker? The virus that's doing the rounds that's allegedly able to lock files and demand a ransom for them.



As for recovery, I'd find out how critical these files are and consider seeking professional assistance. Home remedies are often catastrophic because in most cases, the data is not recovered in the same structure as it was originally lost and is often corrupted even more after indexing.

I lost a load of data a while back. Not critical data (hence not backed up), I downloaded a few "recovery" programs and whilst it did scan the drive and did list lots of stuff that had gone missing, it never actually managed to recover them properly.

[dpSparhawk]

Further to my previous reply. They're all icons with just 6 little pictures on them? sounds like they're not associated to a program. Does the PC have any kind of image editor / viewer on it?

Go grab ACDSee off the net, install it and see if that allows you to view them.

[jaguar982]

Original pics were jpeg and i didnt copy n paste i cut and pasted thats part of the problem they would still be on hard drive somewhere from what i have read
just tried to upload one of the files but it says invalid
because its my fault i will have to pay but £100 would be a struggle lets hope the power of df can find a solution


jag

[jaguar982]

I know cant believe i cut and pasted myself wot a knob
all pics were viewed after search for pics its just my cock up so no virus

jag

[dpSparhawk]

Hope you manage to get it sorted mate. I can't personally recommend any decent file recovery software because as mentioned, I found it just broke the files even more.

Theoretically, they are still on the hard disk however if the computer has been rebooted or had any kind of other file movement, that can contribute to lost data (unless they're on a secondary drive in the computer and nothing else has been copied to it. ).

Perhaps others here can definitely recommend a reliable fully working recovery program.

[jaguar982]

Since it happened i left it on overnight cos i wanted to do as little as poss then i turned it of and its still off

jag

[Teajunkie]

I have used get databack for ntfs before in a similar situation and it worked a treat.
personaly I would remove the hdd and connect it to another pc as secondary drive for recovery.

i have quite a few recovery apps if you would like to try yourself?
just pm me if you want them.

[jaguar982]

To be honest i dont want to do anything that would jepordise losing it any futher i feel sick as it is

jag

[DejaVu]

Jag. I'll PM you.

Forget the Memory stick. That's toast.
Get it from the HDD it was originally on. You'll be able to recover them/most of them using GetDataBack for NTFS. It recovers entire Partitions after they have been wiped out and reinstalled over.
Recovering Cut files is a piece of piss for it.

Cut -> Paste on a computer actually Copies, then 'permanently' Deletes the files one at a time.

GetDataBack is designed to recover deleted files in this situation.

[Mr.James]

I just used an app (literally an hour ago) called 'recover my files' to pull back a tonne of photos from a laptop drive that couldn't even see the 'C' volume. I had to leave the scan going overnight but it got there in the end.

Should be able to find it in all the usual places.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Tim.Lad]

Jaguar982 please for gods sake get a full sector image of the drive before you do anything else

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[jaguar982]

Thanks everybody i feel a little bit hopefull now so glad i just turned it off

jag

[Pegasus]

Thanks everybody i feel a little bit hopefull now so glad i just turned it off

jag

Whatever you do, do NOT use that PC until the hard drive has been placed in another machine and the data recovered.
As others have said, there are utilities that can get the deleted data back from the drive, I personally use Easy Recovery Pro by Ontrack because it has NEVER failed to pull back corrupt or deleted data.

If you're not confident in recovering the data yourself, send me the hard drive using Special Delivery and I'll do it for you.

[akimba]

As stated above it sounds like the new comp does not have association set for these pics, on the desktop/USB when you right click the folder/files what size does it report? If it shows 3.8gb then atleast you should have the raw files and it could be just a matter of associating Windows Photo Viewer to JPEGS. Or going into the files and changing the extension .jpg

On the original machine try using PhotoRec here's a step by step guide http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

[BigBird]

I once recovered over 60gb of photos for a mate of mine when his hard drive suffered from a damaged partition table. He had tried a paid for, no win no fee, service. They didn't manage to recover anything. Must have been total dickheads because I got everything back with the correct file names and directory structure using a simple to use program which I downloaded. Can't remember what it was called but any of the ones mentioned above should work fine.

Before you do anything else do as Pegasus says and remove the drive and place in another PC or connect to another PC using an external interface, because if the drive is your operating system drive then just installing the recovery software on the PC could permanently wipe some of the photos. Try not to worry too much at this stage because they should be easy to recover if you follow the advice given. Hopefully you will get everything back and learnt an important lesson from it. Having said that I bet my mate has forgotten the panic he had about three years ago and still neglects to back up on a regular basis. (">