Data loss

rik81h

rik81h

rik81h

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Joined
4 Nov 2009
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81
Location
Stoke On Trent
Hi all, so i'm ready to jump out of the window right now. I'm came to my computer this morning, went to my documents and the was a fraction of my files there! Only thing that remained was most of the folders that were there, but none of the separate files. jpg's, psd's, pdf's, word & excel documents and many many txt files i use and whatever else.

Less than impressed doesn't come close this is a lot of work gone that's important to me, the only back up i have is a year old since the last format. I don't need kicking in the teeth about backing up please people. I've tried piriform's recuva and remo recover, the latter after digging around showed me 1 yes 1 file that was in there, says it's unrecoverable.

But what i'm confused about is why aren't the rest showing in either program? Even if they'd been overwritten it'd at least show you so i can make some attempt to re-create the files. It's like they've all been moved rather than deleted but they haven't.

Any help or advice besides the obvious would be greatly appreciated.
 
Right after changing some settings i found 2 of my files which it said weren't deleted so i restored them , there where they should be and working. I didn't look for any others in that search because i changed it to find lost files which is taking forever. So are these files there or not? I have show hidden files and folders on and there not there but how can the recovery software say there not deleted and be able to recover them.

Please someone shed some light.
 
I've always found Recuva a bit hit-and-miss with its results to be honest (never used the other program you mentioned).

For any serious file recovery I think GetDataBack is hard to beat - it's not free, but if it can't find your deleted files then probably nothing will. You can run the trial version in discovery mode without paying anything, so you can see what it finds before stumping up the cash to actually recover the data.

In an ideal situation you'd install it on a different volume to avoid overwriting anything, although that's not always possible of course.
 
Which Windows version are you running?

Is it possible that the user profile just got corrupted somehow so windows have created you a new profile. (this would mean the My Documents folders etc would appear empty).
 
@CaptainCrash i may give that a try thanks, although fom the looks of things its from a virus perhaps thats hidden/moved things.

@Smit im on win 7. No there's nothing wrong with my profile, i even made another to try something then removed it. There are folders in documents just none of my files that weren't in folders-minus the couple i've recovered.
 
Files disappearing en masse without warning, but no hardware failure? Sounds a bit odd, like the file system was corrupted or something. Have you tried running chkdsk on the drive?
 
Hi mattus, no i haven't ran chkdsk. I presumed as it was only files in my documents that weren't in folders it was from deletion somehow or virus as the same document types stored elsewhere are ok. No, no hardware failure powercuts or anything that might promote file loss let alone on a mass scale.

On another note the 2 files i thought i'd recovered i hadn't. They were recovered by the program from a folder in documents that i'd moved them to and forgotten i had. So as yet nothing recovered. Nothing i had even exists anywhere, no record of them like they never existed. How is this possible?
 
I'd run a checkdisk. It is possible that something has overwritten the files with empty space or something crashed whilst writing to disk. checkdisk usually gets a whole shed of stuff back, especially if the disk is formatted with ntfs. Tell me you were running ntfs as well as fat32 is pretty flaky compared to it...
 
I will do after i've finished this eset scan.Don't get me wrong chkdsk has fixed many things for me before, but is it really possible to have corruption that affect just one folders content and not its subfolders? You think it'd corrupt say a file type system wide or something.
 
Personally id shut the drive down and not use it. You could be overwriting data without realising. Set it as a slave drive and inspect it on another system. Of course i all fails you can just restore from backup, right?
 
I haven't got windows on any of my other drives and have no space to install it on them neither. I am trying not to make writes to it as i'm usually downloading and encoding etc.

No, no backups per-se. It's only this folder which i have a year old copy of from last format but obviously things have changed since then.

Anyone any ideas how this is remotely possible for there not to be a trace of the items what so ever?

p.s as far as i can remember i haven't been in the folder for a couple of weeks so it could have happened at any point and in which case if they were/are deleted the chance of them being overwritten is rather high.
 
depends on lots of factors...you *could* have had a write error to the directory and it just overwrote the files with garbage. Difficult to say, and the fact you've not been in the folder for a while makes it far harder to say what, when or where...

I know it's too late, but I've started using Win 7's backup utility, it does a fairly good job and having 2 copies of stuff has saved me a fair few times...
 
Ok so i see how that's possible with the only exception of i haven't written anything to it, but i suppose that wouldn't stop something writing to an item in there. Couple of weeks tops i haven't been in there, only because i've been working in different paths just to make things easier.

Well its safe to say whatever the outcome of this i will definitely be backing my stuff up on a mental note-every 5 seconds!

The only thing i have on my main drive is os, music, pics, docs, some downloads as temporary and working folders. Everything else is elsewhere, i keep programs backup pretty up to date, movies tv and everything is elsewhere. The only thing i haven't backed up since last format is docs and music. It's why i purposely had a 1tb as main drive so stuff would have to be elsewhere. Arghhhhhh my god im so sick of today.

I'll run the chkdsk as i say asap, i'll post how it goes but i'm not expecting much. Thanks for your input people. And keep suggestions coming to. Thanks
 
You have double checked that there is not an odd user folder under c:/users and that show hidden files is on right? Just to make sure it's not virus or corruption.
 
rik81h said:
I haven't got windows on any of my other drives and have no space to install it on them neither. I am trying not to make writes to it as i'm usually downloading and encoding etc.

No, no backups per-se. It's only this folder which i have a year old copy of from last format but obviously things have changed since then.

Anyone any ideas how this is remotely possible for there not to be a trace of the items what so ever?

p.s as far as i can remember i haven't been in the folder for a couple of weeks so it could have happened at any point and in which case if they were/are deleted the chance of them being overwritten is rather high.
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just use a live cd. Simply running windows from that hd, will be producing writes on your drive. It's not a case of not writing into that folder, it's a case of writing anything at all to the hd. Use a linux live cd. Mount the drive RO and inspect it. It sounds like one of these stupid viruses that hide your files, but it may not be.
 
I've seen a virus a few times that hides files/folders. Check show hidden files and folders in Folder Options and scan that mofo
 
@Dano No there's no odd users. Yes i have show hidden files on and i've ran unhide.exe.

@whitecrook I have run a live linux before but no idea where that is. I know i'm producing writes and the location is irrelevent, but i suspect it's been like this for up to a couple of weeks.

@d brennen I've scanned with all sorts. Going to do the chkdsk then a stupidly intensive file recovery method see what that brings up.

But guys, say it was a virus that had hidden stuff, surely i or one of the programs would have found it by now?
And also like wise with deletion, if it had/has been deleted there'd be some trace somewhere wouldn't there?
 
If it had been a virus hiding them you'd have seen them with show hidden files turned on, if they have been deleted then data recovery should at least show them recoverable or otherwise.

Sure they're not in the recycle bin?

Sure that you haven't got a second drive that was holding the user data and has since failed forcing windows to create a new user data folder in the default location?

It is very odd for files to just disappear without trace.
 
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