Have I lost my Photos Forever????

Question

My Daughter has reset my PC back to factory settings while doing a complete system restore all the family photos where on the PC (christmas, birthdays, holidays etc) have i lost them or can i find them somewhere hidden in the PC or have they gone forever??? :(

Answer 1

You should take it in and ask someone proffesionally.

Sometimes, they can be retrieved. Even though they might be "erased" from your hardrive they are in a way, still there. It takes a while before things are written over them, so there is hope!

Good luck =]

Answer 2

You already have way enough answers to give you a possible solution. I want to suggest either way that you go and spent a few dollars and buy an external had-drive and save all of your important files on there. Prevention is far better than a sub-cure.
I learnt the hard way! Now anal as it may seem I have 2 internal hard-drives one for operating system and programs the other for backup and another, an external also for backup. I do these backups everyday! Then I load the external drive in the car when I leave home so if the house burns down I still have all my stuff.

Answer 3

It may be possible to recover some or all of your photos but some may have been overwritten and destroyed. You need to use specialist recovery software, or get someone to do it for you. If you can remove the hard drive and install it as a second hard drive in another computer this will minimise the chance of your missing files being overwritten before you can recover them.

Answer 4

I would take your computer to a specialist who may be able to locate them or not ?

For safety you should and no doubt will in future always back-up your photos and other important work at least once per month to a disc or memory stick - and / or keep you photos on the web using Yahoo's photo Albums - then they can never get lost ?

Answer 5

Unless she reformatted the hard drive you should be able to get most of them back - even if she did there's a chance you can rescue some of them..

When you delete a file on a windows machine, all you are doing, essentially, is deleting the link to the file - the file still exists, unless you secure delete it - ie, write lots of data over it.

Don't do ANYTHING with your computer, except install and run some recovery software, try www.download.com

Answer 6

most likely, but if you can get a version of norton utilities, run the undelete program, and ec=ach deleted file it find will show up as ?ilename.xxx. The ? needs to be changed to the correct letter of the filename to get it back. Undelete can only salvage files that have not been overwritten by something else.. Good luck, been there done that.

Answer 7

Hi,
To download Recuva for free you can click here http://j.mp/1qdfeOO

If you've accidentally deleted some important files, don't freak out: try using Recuva and you'll be able to restore them!

Regards

Answer 8

on most machines a system restore ONLY means it restores the system files
This means most of the rest of the info is still there.

If you remember ANY of the files names
(like Christmas.jpg)
so a search for them
Start> Search > Search for files and folders

it works for even just PART of the filesname
like Christm

if you cant find them use an undelete program like this
http://www.download.com/3000-2094_4-10537982.html
http://the-undelete.com/download.php

Answer 9

It is not too clear what you call "back to factory setting". In most of the cases the data is still there, if the disk was not "shredded". There are tools that can recover data even if the disk was formatted

Answer 10

You can probably get some back at least. Download, install and run free Recuva at the link below. It will report what files it can find and what the chance of recovering them is.
Good luck! Hope you weren't too hard on your daughter!