Need help ASAP

[godsdog]

I have a horrible feeling the damage was done first time round when the first program crashed. Talk of backup rubs salt into the open wound

[Splash]

I have a horrible feeling the damage was done first time round when the first program crashed. Talk of backup rubs salt into the open wound

I'd be interested to know in what way it crashed - recovering that amount of data is going to take a fair amount of time, and the machine will look like it's not responding a lot of that time...

As for backups: we all learn the hard way. Hopefully everyone learns from the first time. As someone once said "A fool learns from his mistakes, a wise man from the mistakes of others"

*puts flame jacket on*

[godsdog]

Just deleted about 3 folders with about 120 gb of stuff on them from my secondry drive and i cant get it back.
How can i get it back?

ive tried one undelete program and i found the stuff but as it was copying the stuff it crashed and i tried again and now it has disappeared

Going off that and a later comment, he has a gut feeling and knows what's happened. He saw stuff being copied - the process stopped - he had to restart the program, try again - it wasn't there. ...I'm thinking whatever happened at that point, has ballsed any prospect of recovery up, especially if Winundelete couldn't view it.

lol...it's always worth pointing good backup strategy out, even if it is a bit late for op.
.
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[peterb]

Sadly, the more you try to get it back - the greater the chances of overwriting it. Deleting data doesn't delete it - it only flags the occupied sectors as available for re-use - but the more you use the disk the greater the chance of overwriting. The fact that non of the undelete tools you have tried still detect anything suggests that the some of the Master File Table entries may have already been overwritten. If you were copyingg the deleted files to another location on the same disk - the act of copying them may well have overwritten what you were copying. You should have really copied to another disk - or at least another partition - but it is a bit late now.

If the data is that important, now is the time to contact a data recovery firm - expect to pay from £300 upwards although the actual cost (which could be less) depends on how long they have to spend getting it and the amount to be recovered. However the initial examination is usually free and they wil tell you what they can recover before you pay up.

Although I haven't used them, I did have cause to contact one (recommended by another Hexus user who had and they seemed OK


Redacted - no longer recommended

[Cozwin]

sadly i admit defeat.. but i shall look into backing up, as it is clearly a major problem

[peterb]

There have been a number of threads about backing up recently. A simple option is to get an external hard drive and simply copy the critical data to it (from that point of view, creating a separate partition just for data makes life a bit easier when it comes to copying it.

A more 'sophisticated' strategy would be to get a hard drive the same size (or bigger) than the system hard drive, then boot off a Linux live CD and make a logical clone of the drive - a bit by bit copy. Booting off a linux CD has three advantages

1. The windows system is dead and therefore all the files are static
2. The linux software is free
3. The process is simple - the command is simple dd if=source of-destination - but you do need to ensure that you know what teh source and destination drives are - and of course it is Linux syntax (no C and D drives here thank you!)

The advantage of this approach is that if your system drive borks completely. you just install the drive out of the caddy - and reboot. How often you take the clone depends on how often the data changes of course - or you could take incremental backups - all data that has been added or changed since the last clone.

There are many options and many ways to achieve it - I have outlined just two - but it comes down to a balance of how much time you are prepared to spend backing up, against how much risk you are prepared to accept or what data you are prepared to lose.

[Cozwin]

humm, i just think i may have found a problem... the folder that showed up first time was my torrent folder but i also delted a folder with some documents in it and also a software folder which were hidden folders.. is there anychance there not showing up on programs because of that, if not then where could they have gone as i did not touch them with program that crashed

[peterb]

If you want to start looking at the disk again, best way is to install a new OS on a new disk and then install the old disk as a slave - that way you can look at it without risk of overwriting. There may be recoverable data after this time using some of the tools you have tried, or others that are available - but as I said earlier, the more the drive is used after the deletion, the less the chance of easy recovery, and you are down in the likes iof Winhex and searching the disk at binary (or hexadecimal) to recover fragments of files and following file extents. Not easy and very timeconsuming.

There is one that is supposed to be useful - and that is spinrite. Although originally marketed as a hard disk maintenance and optimising, it can be used for data recovery. It is written by Steve Gibson, who is a (self-styled?) security expert (no flames please - Gibson provokes extreme reactions from his fans and detractors - I'm staying neutral) It apparantly works at a lower level than the directory/partition structure (a bit like Winhex)

It isn't free, but he does off money back (however that works!) if you don't get results. With the dollar/pound exchange rate as it is, it will cost about £40. I haven't used it myself so I can't comment on its effectiveness.

GRCrubbish|rubbishSpinRite 5.0 to 6.0rubbishrubbish

[ascension]

Would now be a bad time to point out the benefits of a good backup regime?

I found it always helpful to have a file recovery program in place on my PC and laptop, rather than wait for a disaster to strike and then screwup the chances of recovering those files by overwriting/installation. A good file recovery program + a regular backup strategy are a must if your data is of any importance to you.

The advantage of having a recovery app already installed is that those files that are modified/updated and then deleted/lost in the time period after the last backup can be recovered immediately.