WARNING !

Hi guys, I'm a bit shell shocked at the moment !

I've been taking and downloading photos for around a year and a half now. First from my compact camera and more recently from my Pentax K10. Over that time I've tried Picasa, GIMP, Faststone, and then I bought Elements 6 which has been great. I take all my pics in RAW and a couple of days back my laptop told me my memory was full ! So, I deleted the pics from Picasa, GIMP and Faststone. I deleted all the photos in stacks I didn't want anymore in Elements, and I deleted all the pics in 'my pictures, as I had them all in Elements. Yesterday I switched my laptop on to find my screensaver was blank ! I usually change it every couple of days with a new photo. THEN, when I checked Elements I got the message that there was no data for the photo's ! After calming myself down I went through the routine of searching, nothing ! I restored the laptop to an earlier time before I started deleting pics, nothing ! The only place left to look was the D drive. There were a hundred or so pics taken with my compact camera there that had been backed up by Elements last year. And that's all I have left !?

1. I think the problem was due to me deleting all the pics in 'my pictures.'

2. Everytime I switch Elements on I get asked do I want to back the library of pics up ? Last year I said 'yes' once. And since then I've been saying 'later'.

3. How many pics lost ? 3-4000 I would estimate. Holidays, our wedding, and hundreds of pics I've been taken for a possible book I've been writing.

SO, here's my WARNING, back your photos up, NOW ! As the hours have passed by I've began to realise just what I have lost when I think of individual photos I had. Never to be replaced.

DERYN

Data isn't actually destroyed when you "delete" files, so you may be able to recover many photos from your hard drive if all the space hasn't been physically overwritten yet.

Get some data recovery software and have a go with it. It may take a long time and a lot of work, but it'll be worthwhile if you recover anything. Meanwhile, DO NOT USE THE COMPUTER FOR ANYTHING ELSE because that will cause overwriting.

Yes it is important to backup your photos (and everything else). It's easy with a external hard drive backup.

That's why most members have desk top drive's or drives else where for all backups, sorry to here you have lost so many photos it's so easily done.

Alternatively, take your hard drive (or whole computer) to an expert to get them to do it for you. They will almost certainly recover hundreds of photos, if not thousands, if the computer hasn't been used a great deal since the deletions.

I have all my pictures on Flickr, all my processed jpgs on my PC and all my raw files on a 400gig external drive. The other day I knocked the external drive onto the floor, it dropped about 2ft onto the carpet ... and totally died. The HD now makes a terrible grinding noise (sounds like the plates have gone) and I have lost every single raw file I had.

Gutted.

Is the grinding noise definitely from the disk, or could it be just the fan (if the enclosure has a fan)?

I'm sorry to hear of these problems, but you've got to admit it's silly not to backup. Everyone should know better these days. Sorry to rub it in!

No, took the drive out of the enclosure just to make sure.
I know it's my own silly fault, just one of those things.

If the platters are still alright they can get the info off of that.

This is where you went wrong. The Elements Organiser acts as a "front end" to the pictures that are already stored on your hard drive in My Pictures; it doesn't duplicate them, just keeps a thumbnail of them in your catalog. Deleting all the images in My Pictures mean that Elements only has its thumbnails to refer to.

The good news is that it's more than likely the files may be recoverable in some form or another. I've used a product called ParetoLogic Data Recovery before with very good results. Think it's about $30...

Have you checked your recycle bin to see if any are in there?

I recently deleted the wrong directory of pics from my NAS drive (and as it's a network drive they don't go to the recycle bin). I used a piece of software called Active Undelete to recover the pics. I got every single one back.

As others have said, deleting a file doesn't actually destroy it. It just gets 'marked' as deleted and OS knows that it can write something else on to this part of the hard disk - as long as you haven't been defragging your drive or copying lots of files since you should be able to recover nearly all of your images. The sooner you try the more you will recover.

Good Luck!

Don't know which NAS drive you own, but those generally cannot be directly connected via USB or other to allow undelete to work properly. Removing the drive from the enclosure and directly connecting it to your computer should work, but you will likely need to know what format it is. e.g. It may not be a Windows (FAT, FAT32 or NTFS) drive, and you therefor might need special software to handle the drive's format.

[EDIT: apparently I sat too long eating my lunch and missed the comment about Active Undelete above while writing... I'll have to keep a note about that in case I need it. ]


I'd be interested in hearing if you can get you images back. I have a NAS, but only use it for shared storage of files that already exist elsewhere. Sadly, I also store my backup files there -- no problem unless I have dual failure.

FYI, for cheap reliable backups, you might want to look into BackBlaze or Carbonite or similar offsite backups service. I currently use BackBlaze and like it a lot. For $50 a year, I know my data is safe even if my entire house gets hit by a giant meteor. (or more likely, set ablaze by one of the neighbor kids playing with fireworks).

Oddly, the last time I lost data, both the main drive and the backup drive had catastrophic failure at the same time. (yes, both in the same box. IDIOT!) To add to the pain, they were Linux format, so minimum non-refundable cost was about $2K just to investigate v.s. $500 for Windows.
So now I backup to an external box in another room and I back up to offsite. (My pics also get backed up immediately to a mirrored RAID box as I import them from the memory card. Yes three backups, and yes I am a little paranoid now).

My NAS drive is a Synology DS106. It's just a single hard disk formatted as NTFS (though I believe it does run a Linux OS, though I'm not sure what). It does actually have a Recycle Bin feature that I hadn't enabled. It's the first time I've owned a NAS drive at home and I got this one cheap off ebay, next time I would get the twin HDD version for RAID1.

Active Delete was great and worked 100%, though it's the first and hopefully last time I ever use it. I recommend it as it's straightforward to use and someone who may not be computer literate wouldn't have any problems with it.

I use my NAS as my main source of data as it's shared between my desktop and laptop, I then keep a backup on a second hard disk within the desktop itself. I also have an off-site backup. As I work in IT I get a bit paranoid about losing data as I've come a cropper myself in the past