M.Damon said:
My darling sister has deleted all of my musc files (over a thousand).
Instead of choosing to send them to the Recycle Bin, which I could fix,
she chose to delete them. Please tell me I can recover my files!?
No back up of the thousands of files on removable media? Get yourself an
external hard drive for Next Time. Burn DVD-Rs regularly, too.
For now, see this information about data recovery:
*IMPORTANT* - It may be possible to retrieve the data by software methods.
DO NOTHING FURTHER ON THE DRIVE. The data is still on the hard drive but if
you overwrite it, it will be extremely difficult or impossible to recover
it. If you use data recovery software, install it on another machine and
either use it from that operating system or create a bootable cd/floppy and
work with that. If you don't have the skill and/or equipment to do these
procedures and the data is crucial, take the machine to a professional
computer repair shop that has experience in doing data recovery. This will
not be your local version of BigStoreUSA. In-shop data recovery is usually
not exactly cheap (for ex., my charges are generally $150-350USD), but it
normally costs less than sending the drive to a company like Drive Savers.
You need to make the determination of the value of your data and decide
what to do.
If money is no object, just send the hard drive to a professional data
recovery company like Drive Savers (my preference) or Seagate Data
Recovery. General prices run from $500USD on up. Drive Savers recovered all
the data on a failed laptop drive for one of my clients and it cost $2,700.
He thought it was worth the money; only you know what your data is worth. I
understand that some insurance companies are now covering data recovery
charges so check with yours.
Drive Savers -
http://www.drivesavers.com
Seagate Data Recovery Services -
https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/
If you want to try this yourself, here are some links to various programs. I
use Easy Recovery Pro, but it is expensive. People whom I respect have
recommended R-Studio and Restoration. YMMV.
http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html
PCInspector File Recovery -
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/welcome.htm
Executive Software ?Undelete? -
http://www.undelete.com/undelete/undelete.asp
R-Studio -
http://www.r-tt.com/
File Scavenger -
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
Ontrack's EasyRecovery -
http://www.ontrack.com/software/
Malke