Deleted loads of photo's and need help retrieving them please

Hello to all,

I am trying to recover some photo's I deleted a few days ago and have tried all that I know to do so and am now in need of some expert help. I am relatively experienced with using (generally) computers, so have a little knowledge.

I had a very messy external hard drive of probably 15,000 photo's and probably around 25-35 video's. These however were duplicates in some cases. Due to this, I installed VisiPics to help sort and delete the duplicates. However…… When it had finished, I checked some of the photo's and for example saw one photo which had the original and three others. When I hovered over them, three had a circle and one didn't which to me meant it would delete the three and keep the one. All of the photo's were like this so I pressed delete.

After I had done this, I saw that I had loads of photo's and video's missing. This was because the folders were completely empty. I looked in the recycle bin of the laptop (HP Pavilion G) and they weren't there. I then checked to see if the ext HDD had a recycle bin but I couldn't see one.

Sooooo…….

I have tried various programs (free and free to try) and have found that Asoftech found loads of photo's but don't necessarily know if they were the ones missing as I had taken loads over the course of my kids first six years of life. Plus…. this program was running for around three days and was still searching this morning but seemed paused??

Sorry for the long story, but if someone would be kind enough to offer some advice, I would be indebted to you as my wife is probably going to murder me when she finds out

Thanks in advance

Craig

Did you try recuva? It has a #1 reputation.

Peter

Agreed with the above, but lets check something first, how many hard drives are in that system ?

There is next to no info on that program, although if you open the help file, you can contact them directly for help, but I fear it won't be much use, but my reason for asking about the hard drives is because all the recovery tools I use say do NOT install to a drive you want to recover from.

A major point is do NOT install\uninstall to that drive until this is resolved, the more you use that drive the harder it becomes to recover the files, because as your system writes to the drive, it could be writing over the files you have lost, making it harder to recover them, so take care how you use that drive until you have get a solution.

Do you have another system you can use as well as a hard drive "caddy" (can't think of a better term ATM) available to use ?

The best option is to add the drive to another system and use that to try and find the files, as you won't be altering the drive by installing anything else, and as such increase the chances of recovering the files.

Another way to try and find the files is to burn a copy of Puppy Linux to a disk on another system, then boot to that disk on this system to scan the drive, then you can save any files to a USB drive if you find what your looking for, doing this means your not affecting the hard drive and you increase the chances of finding the files, do you have a way of doing this ?

Thanks for the replies. I will look into what advice you have given, but it is also very much appreciated. I have got another HDD on order so will try and recover the lost files to the new drive.