My sister just called, she accidentally deleted a ton of files and pictures from her windows based computer and emptied the recycle bin before she noticed the missing folders, she works in the medical field and most of it is years of research, study cases etc, very important information to her (I know, she should have had a backup :~ )
I told her to not do anything else on that PC and to not turn it off until we come up with a plan. She is going to give me a call later tonight.
What is THE BEST data recovery software, paid or free to recover the lost files? I am inclined to recommend her seek a professional data recovery service.
Recuva is good but the biggest thing stopping you from recovering files is that the sectors can't be written over, were they stored on the OS drive or a secondary or external hard drive?
The first thing she should do is not write any more files to the hard drive because they can overwrite the deleted files. The ones she deleted are not physically gone (unless they are overwritten). When a file is deleted the pointer to it is deleted by not the actual file.
Recuva works fairly well especially in deep scan mode. It usually is able to recover files but not always.
Puran File Recovery works way better then Recuva. If I recall correctly it also has a deep scan mode that will bring back more than one can imagine (thousands and thousands). My kid’s flash drive got corrupted and Puran was able to bring them all back. Recuva wasn’t able to do it which is why I rank Puran over it.
Both are free. Recuva is a bit easier to use so I would try that first. Then Puran if the files are found.
I wouldn’t bother with a professional service unless the drive was physically damaged, etc. I’ve never been unable to recover files, even from drives that had been quick formatted.
* important: write any recovered files to another physical drive because it’s possible to overwrite the ones you want to recover.
Recuva is the best, they have advanced options to where you can force it to dig down even deeper, it can sometimes recover written over files, if she just emptied the recycle bin and hasn’t done a ton of other read/write operations the files should still be there intact all it does is changes a single bit when the file space is “deleted” but the data is still there, well until heavy read/write cycles overwrites it
They even have a Recuva portable so you can run it from a pen drive and not have to worry about installing anything
I have an OS called UBCD4WIN on a pendrive, fire up the computer, boot from the pen drive, boot into a working version of Windows XP [all loaded from the pendrive]…have full access to the data on the drive, it’s amazing and scary all the stuff people leave on these drives when they chuck old computers (this is why Dariks boot and nuke is so important :D)
I forgot to mention that if she has such important files on the hard drive that she should clone it periodically. I have 2 physical drives in my pc and I clone the main one to the other one weekly. It’s an exact image of the main drive including the operating system. If the main one crashes I can switch plugs on the 2 drives and be up and running in a few minutes. An docking station can be used for the secondary drive if you don’t want to have it in the pc.
And/or off site data storage, dropbox, google drive, carbonite…
Offload mission critical data, if you need it, you can get it back (well if you don’t forget the passwords) but this is also why passwordsafe is also a good idea too
If it's a desktop pc, I'd turn it off. A hard off might even be best, like pulling out the cord. Other processes can run in the background and overwrite the sectors. Defrag, updates being automatically downloaded, possibly some antivirus software...who knows. Install the recovery software onto a second computer and install her hard drive into that second computer.
Thanks for the replies so far, as far as l know the data was in the same hard drive as the OS. She is in another state so I can’t ( and don’t want to get blamed if something happens) help her directly.
Anyone knows how much the data recovery service costs? By what she told me I am guessing a couple of GB’s in several hundred files, mostly word documents, worksheets, PDF, power point presentations, pictures and videos.
I personally use Acronis and have 2 backups in different drives, but it’s too late for her now, want to help her first, I’ll have a talk afterwards about backing up files, she is too freaked out now and wants to solve the problem.
They will rarely give you a quote without looking at the drive first to see what is needed. It’s a bit like “my car is making a weird noise. How much to fix?”
I agree with leaftye, don’t go through shutdown, don’t use it at all, but i am hesitant to recommend pulling the plug, if it crashes the drive then the cost just shot upward, but shutting down may overwrite some if not lots of files, so there is no easy answer here
Well, She called me and I gave her the options you guys told me, apparently she has some of the text information in printed documents and presentation handouts so that can be scanned to rebuild the documents, the rest I don’t know, my advise to her was to seek the professional help listed here if its that important. I and also told her about the Recuva software but also told her if she uses it or any other data recovery software is at HER own risk, I’ll probably text her that same message just to be clear about it.
Hope she decides to go with the pros.
Thanks guys for your help Going to do a backup of my drives just in case (Knocks on wood) BTW Acronis rocks! has saved my butt at least 2 times now, I use a different partition on the drive to store the backup and use the other computer in my home to keep a copy of it and an external hard drive as last line backup. the pics are also stored in dropbox
Installing the Recuva software will overwrite some of her files so keep that in mind
Perhaps the best thing is to hibernate her computer since that file is already there (ONLY if its enabled already) then pull the drive and use another computer to search it for files.
Acronis has saved me a couple of times but it has also let me down. I had some disk corruption which would not allow the disk to function. Windows could no longer recognize the drive. Acronis had done a mirror image of the drive, with the corruption intact, and then shut down. So the backup file was no good. I moved the disk drive to another computer, used a freeware data retrieval software which I cannot remember name now. It took like 20 hours to pick all of the data off of that disk. Every photo, Word doc, music files. We only lost one email. It was amazing. I may need to use it on my brain to remember the name of the software. I think it was “Partition… something”. We use Carbonite now.
1. How long has it been since she deleted the files?
2. Same drive as the OS… same partition as the OS?
If so, I’d agree with turning the computer off immediately, pulling the plug.
While the risk of system corruption is slim, Windows writes a lot of data during shutdown which is likely to overwrite the deleted files.
Find an external HDD enclosure, connect it to another computer with Recuva or Puran.
R-studio gives you a bootable disk so that you can access the HDD without an enclosure and on the same computer.
Going to do a backup of my drives just in case (Knocks on wood) BTW Acronis rocks! has saved my butt at least 2 times now, I use a different partition on the drive to store the backup and use the other computer in my home to keep a copy of it and an external hard drive as last line backup. the pics are also stored in dropbox