Help, my pictures disappeared! ;_;

[Miriel]

I... I was working on pictures. Lots of pictures. For days. Weeks. Soooo many hours. I've been editing pictures FOR DAYS. And they're gone now, and I don't know where and I started to cry. :(

I had about 4 gigs worth of photos I've been editing and photoshopping for the last few weeks. I was just about finished, but I had no more space on my laptop so I kept getting that critically low blah blah message.

So then, we tried to network between computers so I can put the pictures on the other computer to free up space on my laptop.

I took the folder with the pictures and put it in the shared docs folder. But it didn't work. The networking. So we gave up.

And now they're gone. I don't know where they went. And I have 4 gigs more free space than I did yesterday so I assume they're gone? And did I mention the crying? I cried.

Omg, help. :(

[Shoeberto]

It would appear that if you have 4gb more of free space where there used to be 4gb of photos that they would be gone, however, it's beyond me what could have happened. Have you checked the remote computer you tried to send them to? Did anything crash that might've corrupted the photos? It's really hard to tell what might have happened.

[Dr Unne]

Do you know the filename of any of the files? If so open up a DOS window (Command Prompt) and type


dir /s c:\WHATEVER_THE_FILENAME_IS

and wait a long time while it runs. If it's still on your HD that will find it, as long as you have the right filename. Do the same thing on the other computer if you can't find it on your own computer.

[Yamaneko]

Dragging and dropping is the cut command. Was this shared folder on your machine or on the other one?

[Del Murder]

It was on hers. Would a file recovery program work?

[Shoeberto]

It would, though I'm under the impression that they're quite expensive. Just as long as nothing new has been put on the drive that would go over where the pictures originally were stored, it might work.

[bipper]

http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html

edit ( FreeUndelete ) is the one I have used. werd :cool:

These should work. Download the image sepcific one on the right.

For all that is holy, do not use the computer that you lost the pictures on, they could possibly get written over with new information. If you have another HDD use that. Else just use the problematic one and cross your fingers.

[Del Murder]

We're running recovery programs right now, but it looks like it's hit and miss.

But um, how the hell does something like this happen in the first place??

- Miriel on Del's computer

[Dr Unne]

But um, how the hell does something like this happen in the first place??

Microsoft Windows.

[Yamaneko]

If it was really deleted then it might be too late. There's so much hard drive access under Windows that those particular 0's and 1's containing your pictures might have been overwritten by other 0's and 1's.

Did you try what Unne suggested?

And in the future, especially if you're in the multimedia business, invest in an external hard drive. They're life-savers.

[Dr Unne]

In case anyone cares how this all works: When you delete a file, you actually don't remove it from your drive. There's a big table that says basically "A file called PICTURE.JPG is right here *point* on the hard drive, two inches from the left on the 4th platter, and it's 1.2MB big. No other file can go here, this space is occupied." When you delete PICTURE.JPG, the entry for that file is removed from the table, but nothing else happens. Two inches from the left on the 4th platter, the guts of PICTURE.JPG are still there, but Windows pretends there's nothing there at all. 15 minutes later when you need to make a new file, Windows will say "Hmm. I need some free space to stick this file. Well, two inches from the left on the 4th platter is empty according to my list, so let's stick it there!" and only at that point is PICTURE.JPG gone forever.

If the drive was so full that you were getting critical low space messages, then it's very likely too late for many / most of the files. ANY new file that was created since the pictures were deleted have to have overwritten free space that was previously a picture, because there is little or no other free space to use. Even if you didn't make a new file, as Yams said, Windows swaps crap to disk all the time, compulsively, and each time it does, more picture data is gone.

If you ever delete a file you think you need to undelete, the best thing to do is immediately stop doing everything on the computer and turn it off. Then boot from a CD or floppy and try to recover it from there. However in this case it's quite possibly too late for that. Everyone learns the need for file backups approximately ten seconds after the first time they lose all their files and realize they have no backups. It happens to us all.

[Shoeberto]

Everyone learns the need for file backups approximately ten seconds after the first time they lose all their files and realize they have no backups. It happens to us all.
The sad, sad truth. I figured my data would be fine on a separate partition when I installed Ubuntu. Then the Ubuntu paritioner destroyed all of the data on the drive D:

So, yes, external hard drive, or separate computer, or anything to back it up well. Sorry we can't be of more help, but that's just kinda how it goes in this situation ._.

[Del Murder]

I ordered an external hard drive on Monday. It should be here tomorrow. :crying2:

- Miriel

[Yamaneko]

The sad, sad truth. I figured my data would be fine on a separate partition when I installed Ubuntu. Then the Ubuntu paritioner destroyed all of the data on the drive D:
Yeah, the Ubuntu partitioning tool is not all that great. I usually partition beforehand using Partition Magic since it has the ability to create ext3 fs.

Did you get a firewire external drive?

[rubah]

poor miriel :( Do you still have the originals of your pictures? ;o

This is the kind of reason why I haven't installed linux at all, because I don't want to bother with partitioning and losing years of stuff;o

[Del Murder]

Did you get a firewire external drive?

Hahaha. My laptop is so ghetto it doesn't even have firewire connection.


poor miriel :( Do you still have the originals of your pictures? ;o

The photos were from a wedding weeks ago, and I did a new wedding since then, so the memory cards were erased. Sad thing is that last night, I was getting ready to burn the images onto a CD for backup (which is what I do for every wedding). I had the blank CD in the tray and I even had freakin' Nero open. But then... but then I didn't burn them. And now, look. :(

[Dr Unne]

Another good option in the future is to upload your pictures to a web server. Most server admins make regular backups to tape or other media. So you have the backup on the server itself, and potentially tons of free backups created by a professional without any effort on your part.

If you email a file to yourself via a Yahoo or Gmail account, it's very unlikely you'll ever lose it due to hardware failure. Yahoo and Gmail have huge buildings full of hard drives and when one goes bad they just shove another on the rack, and they have mechanisms built in to prevent any files from being lost when such a thing happens.


Yeah, the Ubuntu partitioning tool is not all that great. I usually partition beforehand using Partition Magic since it has the ability to create ext3 fs.

Can't go wrong with fdisk. (Then again, I guess you can go wrong with it. Easily.)

The photos were from a wedding weeks ago, and I did a new wedding since then, so the memory cards were erased. Sad thing is that last night, I was getting ready to burn the images onto a CD for backup (which is what I do for every wedding). I had the blank CD in the tray and I even had freakin' Nero open. But then... but then I didn't burn them. And now, look.

Do you still have Nero open? If so, it's possible Nero cached your pictures in preparation for burning them to CD, depending how far you got. If you have Nero open, don't close it, and have a look around.

It's also possible Photoshop or some other program left cached temp copies of your files somewhere. It depends how sloppy the program is. You may want to look in your various Temp folders. "c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp" for example. Look at anything that has any possibility of being a photo file.

Did you run the command I suggested above?

[crono_logical]

Dragging and dropping is the cut command.Only if you're moving from one place to another on the same drive, otherwise it's copy - unless you hold Shift at the same time to force moving.

[Miriel]

Yeah.... I was only able to recover like 1/10th of the pictures. I hate the world and stuff.

[bipper]

You can look around for a disaster recovery place. They charge and assload, but you could flush the drive in the toilet, throw it in Mt. St. Helens, use the thing as a turn table as you have vanilla ice freestyling in your living room, and hurl insults at the drive for hours and make it feel like it will never ammount anything, and they could still recover a ton of the data off the thing. I wanna say it is like 110 bucks a gigabyte, going rate.

edit: Here is a link to look at.

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1254612&page=1

Sorry, kinda reaching for loose ends but what other chance ya got :D

Bipper