Greetings and salutations. I am trying to help my BIL with a computer issue. I’m going to recount what he’s told me, but some if not most of it might not make perfect sense since he is not really a computer guy. Plus, this all started about a year ago, so his memory is fuzzy. The long and short of it is that he (believes) did a system restore on a Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista and afterwards all his files and photos are gone. He is wanting to find those files on his laptop again.
I asked him if he actually did a factory reset vs system restore and he does not recall. The word he used to describe what he did is “reset” but that kinda seems beyond his ability. OTOH he probably would not necessarily understand the difference. (Not that he’s stupid it’s just he’s a regular computer user like most people and I don’t think most regular users understand the difference, either.)
It seems to me that if he did a system restore that all the files should be there and the fact that they are gone indicates he actually did a factory reset.
Is there a way to tell? If in fact he did a restore and for some reason all the files disappeared off the :c drive, how do we get them back?
If he didn’t reformat the hard drive there’s a chance the files are still there, but a factory reset might have deleted all of them in the process, even though they might still physically be on the drive somewhere.
Are the missing files worth hiring someone to recover them, because I doubt this is something that can be done without detailed knowledge of how the drive is formatted and the OS’s file structure.
If he remembers the name of any file or files, search the whole hard drive for that file. Here’s Microsoft’s page on finding files.
If they’re not there, he can try one of the various “undeletion” utilities out there. They basically all just scan the file system for files that have been marked as deleted but not overwritten yet.
If this happened a year ago, though, his files may not be recoverable.
He might also consider going to an outfit that performs data recovery. I was able to recover all the data I had on a drive after the OS went belly up. It was not cheap, ($80 for the recovery and a similar amount for a new drive onto which to copy the files), but I was able to recover 100% of what I feared I had lost. (I could have “survived” on what I had included on my normal back-ups, but, as usual, the computer died between back-ups, just before I was scheduled to back up a significant amount of data I had uploaded from another source.)
Tell him about a computing concept called “backing up” for the future. Laptops are about the worse for storing something that you value. Among the normal pitfalls of computers, such as hard drives failing, laptops can be stolen or dropped.
Remind him to burn his important files to a CD/DVD or copy them to a USB thumb drive or even an external hard drive.
About 12 months ago I managed to disappear huge chunks of the stuff on my system. I had no idea how I did it or even how long it had gone unnoticed. In a state of panic I downloaded recuva on the recommendation of gizmo’s freeware, my go-to source for all my free software needs. It worked like a charm and I would recommend it to anyone. It took very little time and effort.
I was thinking the same thing. $80 for data recovery is actually astoundingly cheap! Has the price come down that much in general? A colleague of mine paid around $1600 to recover data from a laptop drive 6-7 years ago.
There are some great suggestions here. . . But I fear that if the data was lost a year ago, it is likely long gone by now. Anyone who suspects data loss on a computer should, as their first step, stop using the drive immediately. That preserves the best chances for recovering lost data.
Heck, I once paid $8,000 for data recovery. And that was negotiated down from over $15,000. (If you simply don’t have the money you can offer the recovery company what money you do have, or none.)
The idea that $80 is expensive is almost from another planet.
Obviously it depends upon what has gone wrong. Disk failures can cost arbitrary money. Recover companies get called into recover data after fires, floods, and deliberate damage. No guarantees, but they can often get some stuff back.
If data has been deleted it can often be recovered - but as a disk is used it tends to start to overwrite more and more of the space, wiping more and more of what might be recoverable. Very hard to imagine anything would be left after a year.
Rats. It looks like his only option is to pay for data recovery, if indeed that’s what he wants. I think the files of most personal value were photos, but if they’ve been gone for a year so I don’t think he’s missing them anymore. I was hoping there would be something a layperson could do, but it doesn’t look like it.
I’d recommend backing up important files to at least two different external hard drives or USB thumb drives, in case one fails. And I also like the online backup services like Carbonite or Mozy, because once you set up the backup, it’s automatic.
Just to be clear on what I had to recover:
The drive was a single 160 GB drive on a desktop running Win XP. Something killed the Operating System, so that I could not boot up, making most recovery options pointless. (I had some offers to from friend-of-friend hobbyists to attempt recovery, but I had the cash and was a bit paranoid about losing some recent photos, so I took it to Micro Center, which has a repair shop in-house.
A few games and a couple of utilities for which I had only executable code will no longer run. (Hey, it was XP; I bought a system with Win 8.1 to continue 'puting.) But the utilities have been more than replaced by some of the stuff bundled on the new 'puter and the games are not a big deal. I can see them and some of them work; I just have not invested any energy in seeing whether I can make all of them run, now.
It’s possible for the OS to be screwed up but the file structure to be intact, so that the system won’t boot, but the drive can be accessed as a secondary or external drive from another system. It sounds like that was the case for your 160GB XP drive. In that case, I can well understand that they only charged $80 for the recovery.
For Tom’s issue, very likely all they had to do was pop out the hard drive and plug it into a working system and just copy the files from the old hard drive to a new one. The files themselves weren’t deleted, it’s just that the operating system was hosed. Another way to recover files without even opening the case is to plug in a bootable thumb drive that has a working operating system on the drive, boot to that OS, and access the files on your old hard drive. In both cases you’ll need some place to copy the old files to, so just as Tom did you’ll probably have to spring for a new hard drive, or cloud storage, or whatever.