Data recovery companies..

Ha, no
Just an old school mates ex wife, nothing to do with me at all :p
I have my own laptop for dogemininer (and yes it's still running)
 
Dunks said:
2 years of University work not backed up, madness.
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This.
My nephew has just lost nearly 2 years of Uni work on a USB pen drive he lost and he's got to start again.
It amazes me how many people don't know about free cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.
 
Dimple said:
This.
My nephew has just lost nearly 2 years of Uni work on a USB pen drive he lost and he's got to start again.
It amazes me how many people don't know about free cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.
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I don't think it's that people don't know about them, more a mixture of privacy and the hassle of using cloud based services.

With a USB drive, you get the ease of using files in the known file explorer system and not have to upload and download to a website after having to log in etc, then you have places with restricted internet usage or no internet at all, and finally with USB you know only you have access to those files.

I do use Dropbox but very rarely, most of my work is on my USB drive on my key chain (although I do make back ups of ongoing work I'm doing).
 
Dimple said:
My nephew has just lost nearly 2 years of Uni work on a USB pen drive he lost and he's got to start again.
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What course was this for? Surely with most courses the work is handed in bit-by-bit so isn't needed again. Old work and notes are a great reference, but not essential to successive years.
 
You have to get yourself into a habit of backing up just so you remember to do it. Unfortunately most people will learn the hard way as did I when I lost some photos from my Nan's funeral. Looking back I could've probably got them back very easily but I was naive and didn't know what I was doing.
 
If anyone has been trying to recover Fies the wrong way it could be a disaster,

Have you tried getdataback, I swear by this, although depends on your situation but it has found many black holes.

Make sure you put it in a machine as a second drive! Do not write to the disk, depends what type of formatting has gone on, high level, low level, how many times, how much the drive has been used since
 
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With the right tools you'd be amazed what is recoverable. Unless you are doing 7 pass wipes of your free space with CCleaner or something comparable, it is still on the disc.

Firstly, ensure you go to the 'right' company to do this, it probably won't be cheap. This will be the difference between All/Most/Some/None of the files recovered.

Secondly, stop using the laptop now. Chances are that all that has been genuinely overwritten is just the OS and applications sectors of the hard drive. Even a 'real' format just changes the tables and leaves the actual files on the disc. Using the laptop will be creating new files over the old ones, potentially making the old files unrecoverable.

You can download stuff to do this yourself, and you'd be fine for sure, but with it being uni work, I'd strongly advise against that method.

For my uni work I have everything in DropBox (which mirrors to two PC's as well as their cloud) and I have an Apple Time Capsule). That probably really isn't enough, but it does me ok. Strongly advise that your friend moves to more sensible data backup.

Go for a simple option, even if it costs money. I sorted my mum out with full cloud backup of her entire PC for something silly like £20 a year. Sure, it costs £20 and you could do it for 'free' with some old PC kit, or hacking together various applications, but ease of use is so important these days. USB key fobs are NOT data backup in my eyes, they are far too prone to breaking or getting lost.
 
For home use I prefer re-directing the location of My Documents to Dropbox/My Documents.

I've done this for friends and family and they don't even realise it's any different. Not only does it work flawlessly, but you can un-delete items or restore older versions :cool:

Won't work in a corporate environment though.
 
EVH said:
Won't work in a corporate environment though.
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You'd hope any corporate environment that locks down computers and internet access will also provide facilities like regular backups, hopefully with off-site storage. You'd hope, anyway :)
 
A factory reset? I highly doubt the amount of lost work amounts to more storage space than the factory reset of the OS and OEM software bundled with it and as such the data won't be 100% recoverable. Those areas of disk will have been long overwritten.

There's no reason to not give it a shot but I wouldn't spend any amount of money first and instead use a no win no fee service.
 
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