I made an unbelievable rookie mistake today, I left a brasileira on my laptop while I went to the store to get food. Wouldnt you know it, she did various searches on my hardrive and found pictures of my trip that was buried deep in the windows folder! She then emptied the damn recycle bin, so now they are gone.

Can anyone tell me a good recovery application that I can use to retrieve those pics? I have tried EASEUS, RECUSA and Recover Files and still cant getthem back! It just happened today and I have over 40 gigs of space in the hardrive so I dont hink it was overwritten. Is there a way to get them from the registry or from an application.


A few of the pics are of a girl who just left two days ago to get married in atlanta so i may never see her again. I really want to get these pics back. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

There is a simple and free un-delete program here that will often work wonders.
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=28

If you are really serious about data recovery you should stop using the computer at once, remove the drive and attache it to another computer before attempting recovery. Every mouse click could be overwriting valuable data. If the "roadkil" program doesn't work and no one else jumps in with a working option I have much more powerful software at work that will recover jpg's in almost any state from the disk assuming they have not been overwritten.

I am starting to think that this female works for the CIA!! How can it be this hard to find some deleted pictures? I have a keylogger program installed on my laptop, i know exactly what she did. She searched, found the pics, deleted them, then cleaned the recycle bin, thats it.

I have used 4 different recovery applications (Road kill doesnt work, i keep getting an error message saying "unable to open selected disck" when I choose the C:\.

This is geting to be so fustrating. Please hook me up with the more powerfull applicaion. thx

I'll get back to you Monday. I have a program at work that scans the whole disk sector by sector independent of the file system simply seeking raw data consistent with jpg's. If anything is there it WILL find it. Can't remember the name or where I got it but I should have a copy on the server at work.

Here is another one I use quite a bit that is pretty good. They have a demo at http://www.quetek.com/bin/32fsu32.exe where you can try it and see if it finds anything. If the quick search fails try the "long" search. It is quite thorough. If it works you could buy it of if you want to wait til I get back to work Monday I could 'loan' you my paid copy.

thankyou very much I am Sancho. It is so fustrating that I cant recover a folder with 30 pics inside when I know all she did was delete the folder and then empty the recycle bin. I even know the naming convention of the pics and still cant find anything after using 4 diferent apps.

I am assuming this application looks for all picture formats. BMP too?

I learned a very valuable lesson, always backup your data and store it on the web where it cant be deleted. As it turns out, most applications can NOT retrieve fotos that have been deleted and then the recycle bin has been emptied. I have used (GETBACKDATA, Restoration, File Scavenger, Recuva and EASEUS!) none of them worked.

AT first I thought I was doing something wrong but i just tested it right now. I went and deleted a picture and then cleaned my recycle bin. For the next 5 minutes, I used every application i had to try and retrieve that picture, no dice!!!

I think its easier to retrieve a pic if the disk has been formated than it is if the recylce bin was emptied. Those pics are gone forever and it is a HUGE loss to me. A very valuable lesson learned!!

Using the "long" search on the Queteck File Scavenger takes hours so if you have tried 5 programs and completed your search in 5 minutes it has been only the most cursory search. Queteck File Scavenger is a good program for recovering pictures but it may take hours to scan an entire disk.

Here is another freeware undelete that is decent and simple. http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html

I will PM a couple of other options. Try the "long" search in Queteck File Scavenger.

Thumper, the valuable lesson you should have learned here is never let a jealous garota (and they're all jealous) use your computer unless you're there watching over he shoulder.

Couldn't you just use System Restore to the previous day?

It depends on which version of Windows you are running. The good news if you are running a home version, you can upgrade to a business version of ultimate and still get your files back.

Here is a link.

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/recover-deleted-files-using-previous-versions-shadow-copy-in-windows-vista/

I learned that lesson in Peru. I left my wingman alone with 2 peruanas while I went to the bathroom. I came back and they had my digital camera in hand and were blabbering a lot of very fast Spanish which I did not get, because they were speaking so fast. Of all the latin countries I have visited Peruvian spanish seems the most difficult for me. Anyway by the time I grabbed my camera back they had deleted about 20 or so fotos. I yelled at my wingman Dude, what the fuck? you're sitting right there! Don't you see what they are doing? but it was too late. I'll never do that again.

The best thing to do with your valuable pictures is copy them to a flash stick ASAP and keep that stick locked up in your room save.

Recovery depends a lot upon your operating system and hard disk format. The old FAT file systems simply changed the first letter of the file name to a question mark and I believe that the operating system overwrote these files in oldest to newest order.

I do not know much about how NTFS handles the files. Consider building the "Ultimate Boot Disk For Windows" on a different computer. It will boot you into an operating system running on RAM DISK and has lots of file recovery tools.

Another tip is to setup multiple user accounts on your machine and log onto a restricted guest account before letting the chica touch your machine. It is very easy to set the security on your folders so the pictures are invisible to the other usr account.

Latinalover:

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I left my wingman alone with 2 peruanas while I went to the bathroom. I came back and they had my digital camera in hand and were blabbering a lot of very fast Spanish which I did not get, because they were speaking so fast. Anyway by the time I grabbed my camera back they had deleted about 20 or so fotos. I yelled at my wingman Dude, what the fuck? you're sitting right there! Don't you see what they are doing? but it was too late.

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