HELP!!! I need a good file recovery program!

[StuartT]

I just managed to erase all my lights from last night! Two hours of data... 😭

Can anyone recommend a good file recovery program?

[Dr_Ju_ju]

what were they stored on and the OS is ?? 

[StuartT]

2 minutes ago, Dr_Ju_ju said:

what were they stored on and the OS is ?? 

On my hard drive and windows 10

[Dr_Ju_ju]

first off DON'T do anything on the drive where they are stored, then install Microsoft's "Windows File Recovery tool", that should do what you want ....

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-file-recovery/9n26s50ln705?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

 

Edited October 2, 2021 by Dr_Ju_ju

[StuartT]

3 minutes ago, Dr_Ju_ju said:

first off DON'T do anything on the drive where they are stored, then install Microsoft's "Windows File Recovery tool", that should do what you want ....

ok, but won't installing that overwrite things?

[Dr_Ju_ju]

hopefully it will install to a different part of the disk, but unfortunately you will have to just bite the bullet & go for it.... hopefully this incident will teach you one of the benefits of saving to separate disc's or network storage etc....

[michael8554]

Just to be clear:

Deleted files go to the Recycle Bin, from where they can be Restored.

So did you "Empty Recycle Bin" ?

Then you will need the File Recovery Tool.

Michael

[StuartT]

thanks everyone. 

Unfortunately, the windows recovery tool found nothing. I purchased a license to a highly recommended tool called EaseUS, but it's not looking too promising.

A whole night wasted.

Oh well... lessons learned, I guess

[tooth_dr]

I did the same recently via APP.  It has a nuance when you sometime the file visible in the window isnt the one that gets deleted, it does tell you but I didnt read it properly.  Anyhow somehow manage to deleted nearly every light from a whole night.  I used RECUVA and it found them all, and I was able to recover them without hiccup.  You could give it a go?

[mareman48]

On 02/10/2021 at 11:46, StuartT said:

thanks everyone. 

Unfortunately, the windows recovery tool found nothing. I purchased a license to a highly recommended tool called EaseUS, but it's not looking too promising.

A whole night wasted.

Oh well... lessons learned, I guess

Have you tried Disk Drill  https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html  Ive used it and its one of the best I've found.

[StuartT]

6 hours ago, mareman48 said:

Have you tried Disk Drill  https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html  Ive used it and its one of the best I've found.

No. not used that one. 

But sadly the files are well and truly gone. I tried several tools.

I've re-shot the sequence now. Thanks

[Neil H]

Hi sorry to hear nothing worked if you ever need software try majorgeeks.com has loads of software that may help 

[Shimrod]

15 hours ago, StuartT said:

No. not used that one. 

But sadly the files are well and truly gone. I tried several tools.

I've re-shot the sequence now. Thanks

It would be worth partitioning your hard drive and saving all the images to the separate partition. This would avoid any accidentally deleted files being overwritten by windows temporary files and increase your chances of recovery should you have the same mishap in the future.

[malc-c]

Personally I would suggest investing in a NAS drive.  I picked up one a few years back like this one and use Macrim Reflect to back up files / folders / dives to it.  The drives are run in RAID so mirror each other and if one ever fails juts plug in  a replacement  and the raid is rebuilt with no loss of data.

To be honest, if you just accidently erased the files, the data is still there, just not indexed, and most disk management systems will still mark the sectors on the disc as having data when new applications are installed unless the disk is very tight on space.  Most recovery tools are run on a different machine with the effected disk connected as a secondary drive.  However, if you have since retaken the images then it a case of closed gate and bolted horse....  But moving forward no doubt you have learned a lesson here and will now look at a more robust data storage option

[Zermelo]

6 hours ago, malc-c said:

Personally I would suggest investing in a NAS drive

+1

All our devices access files on a shared NAS with two disks.  I didn't see the need for RAID so the files are backed up on a schedule from one disk to the other, and again to a copy in the cloud.

[malc-c]

12 minutes ago, Zermelo said:

+1

All our devices access files on a shared NAS with two disks.  I didn't see the need for RAID so the files are backed up on a schedule from one disk to the other, and again to a copy in the cloud.

Basically what you are doing by mirroring one drive to the other is essentially a RAID, but with out the advantages a RAID system has to offer.  Trust me, RAID is a must, especially if the NAS supports hot swapping. 

I got my old Netgear NAS off e-bay for around £50 with two 1TB drives, which I later discovered were cheap ones and not really suited to 27/7 running when one failed nine months later.   I didn't lose any data as the drives were mirrored, although I had lost redundancy until I got a replacement.  I bought a pair of more reliable drives which arrived next day.  This is where the advantage of RAID comes in as it was a simple case of insert the first drive and let the NAS rebuild the array across the first new drive, and then when complete, pull the remaining old drive out and insert the second new drive in its place and let it rebuild the array once more - Took around a day or so and didn't need any other intervention, I just left it to do its thing.

 

[Zermelo]

10 minutes ago, malc-c said:

Basically what you are doing by mirroring one drive to the other is essentially a RAID, but with out the advantages a RAID system has to offer.  Trust me, RAID is a must, especially if the NAS supports hot swapping. 

I got my old Netgear NAS off e-bay for around £50 with two 1TB drives, which I later discovered were cheap ones and not really suited to 27/7 running when one failed nine months later.   I didn't lose any data as the drives were mirrored, although I had lost redundancy until I got a replacement.  I bought a pair of more reliable drives which arrived next day.  This is where the advantage of RAID comes in as it was a simple case of insert the first drive and let the NAS rebuild the array across the first new drive, and then when complete, pull the remaining old drive out and insert the second new drive in its place and let it rebuild the array once more - Took around a day or so and didn't need any other intervention, I just left it to do its thing.

 

Sorry, I was being a bit terse there.

If I were starting from scratch now, I agree I would probably buy larger disks and implement some flavour of RAID from day 1.
But it was messy, for reasons I won't go into (or can't remember!) and I decided the advantages of RAID weren't worth the extra hassle for me.

[Shimrod]

3 hours ago, malc-c said:

Basically what you are doing by mirroring one drive to the other is essentially a RAID, but with out the advantages a RAID system has to offer.  Trust me, RAID is a must, especially if the NAS supports hot swapping. 

I got my old Netgear NAS off e-bay for around £50 with two 1TB drives, which I later discovered were cheap ones and not really suited to 27/7 running when one failed nine months later.   I didn't lose any data as the drives were mirrored, although I had lost redundancy until I got a replacement.  I bought a pair of more reliable drives which arrived next day.  This is where the advantage of RAID comes in as it was a simple case of insert the first drive and let the NAS rebuild the array across the first new drive, and then when complete, pull the remaining old drive out and insert the second new drive in its place and let it rebuild the array once more - Took around a day or so and didn't need any other intervention, I just left it to do its thing.

 

And what do you do if something happens to your NAS? Even if the drives are fine, you may well find you can't just transfer them to a new NAS as it uses a different algorithm for reading/writing to disks - You've still lost all your files.

In our household, the PCs back up to local external drives, and also to a server (which also has an external drive) and the server itself is backed up to the cloud (Backblaze). The local hard drives provide rapid access to data with the server and cloud providing extra resilience and file versioning - but none of that helps unless the first action of any workflow is to back up the files - and when I am capturing images, I use a laptop which isn't connected to anything except mount and camera. My simple suggestion is just to improve the chances of data recovery in the case of accidental file deletion.

[malc-c]

44 minutes ago, Shimrod said:

And what do you do if something happens to your NAS? Even if the drives are fine, you may well find you can't just transfer them to a new NAS as it uses a different algorithm for reading/writing to disks - You've still lost all your files.

In our household, the PCs back up to local external drives, and also to a server (which also has an external drive) and the server itself is backed up to the cloud (Backblaze). The local hard drives provide rapid access to data with the server and cloud providing extra resilience and file versioning - but none of that helps unless the first action of any workflow is to back up the files - and when I am capturing images, I use a laptop which isn't connected to anything except mount and camera. My simple suggestion is just to improve the chances of data recovery in the case of accidental file deletion.

Well there is always the backup of the backups

My workflow uses  a shared network drive (1TB) as the default backup drive.  Macrim Reflect runs on all PCs, with backup plans that back up / copy important documents and files to that shared drive.   I also back up the most important files to dropbox, but only the really critical files as space is limited.  I then have a backup that mirrors the shared drive to the NAS.  So in effect I have two restore solutions, the NAS if the shared drive fails, or the shared drive if the NAS running the RAID fails.

When imaging, the raw images are saved to the observatory PC.  Whilst I have macrim running to image the machine on a regular basis, I use SyncToy to monitor the folder where APT saves the images to and copy them to a folder on the shared drive (and thus to the NAS).  It does this in real time, so should the observatory PC have a hard drive problem it can be reimaged quickly and I haven't lost any images other than the one that may have been in the process of saving to the disk at the time of failure.

Imaging drives is another thing - I recently messed about with NINA on the Observatory only to find it didn't support my old Canon DSLR, and then uninstalling caused other issues.  So it was a simple case to run the rescue media from a USB drive and apply the previous drive image to the PC.  20 minutes and I was back to how things were before I messed about.  Again, these images (compressed) are stored on both the shared drive and the NAS.  With random ad hock images stored on flash drives as a back up mainly as one or two PCs don't really change much in terms of applications installed.

As you say, it's all well and good having all these system, but you also need to be diligent when it comes to deleting anything from the machines.... chances are its the one folder you thought wasn't important and this one that is never backed up

[Zermelo]

I think both instantaneous and scheduled backups have their advantages, so any strategy should ideally incorporate both.

As well as the "accidentally deleted" scenario, there have also been cases where malware has encrypted files on one platform, and the backup software has instantly overwritten copies on another platform with the encrypted versions. Scheduled backups give you a chance to spot that and stop the third copy being overwritten, and even better if the cloud backups automatically keep a number of previous versions.