Data Recovery Question

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i have deleted a folder with many large video files inside it, as it was too big for the recycle bin it asked me to permanently delete it and i said yes.

i am using W7 and getdataback (ntfs) and i cant find my deleted files there is notheing in the folder where they used to be, were talking 40gb of data so where has it gone, i have moved a few files about since but not that much it would overwrite 40gb of data.

any suggestions guys? :rolleyes:
 
Get another hard disk, install windows on it, set your current hard disk as a secondary drive and make an image of it with FTK Imager. This will find anything that is still on the drive, deleted or not.
 
thanks for the advice guys and taking time to reply, what im wondering is why getdataback is not finding my deleted files, its another one of those recommended programs thats meant to recover deleted files, im wondering whats the reson its not finding them. :(
 
You could try photorec, I used it to recover my sister-in-laws data last year.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

I just want to say thanks so much for posting this! I just stumbled across this thread when browsing and decided to try that software on a mini DVD from a camcorder with wedding footage I couldn't copy or play, which I had previously posted about here. What do you know, 30 seconds later it copied the 150mb file to my hard drive in .mpg format and I can now view it!

Awesome! :)
 
You don't need to do much writing to obliterate the header info needed to recover the rest of the file. If its important and you haven't already, stop using the HDD now and use a low level program to image the drive.
 
You don't need to do much writing to obliterate the header info needed to recover the rest of the file. If its important and you haven't already, stop using the HDD now and use a low level program to image the drive.

its a 500gb drive i have nothing that big to save an image to, there was nothing majorly important, just lots of movies i downloaded, would take a long time to get them back but it might be best just doing that.
 
thanks for the advice guys and taking time to reply, what im wondering is why getdataback is not finding my deleted files, its another one of those recommended programs thats meant to recover deleted files, im wondering whats the reason its not finding them. :(

As soon as you delete a file, the space the file occupied becomes available for the OS to re-use and remember too, files are not contiguous, meaning the file could be scattered over different parts of the disk. So theoretically, the file or parts of the file, can be permanently overridden.

The best thing is as soon as you realise you have deleted such a file(s) is to stop using the system. Download Recuva from another machine and install it on to a CD, DVD, USB memory stick etc run the utility from there, and from Safe Mode.
 
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Windows 7 has Previous Versions enabled by default. Depending on where the folder was, might be worth right-clicking in its parent, going to Properties - Previous Versions and seeing if there's anything in there. I'm not sure tho if a) 40gb might be too big and b) if it restores folders at all (might just be files). Worth a look tho.
 
I have found GetDataBack to be completely useless.

I was doing some testing to see how good they were, and GDB never found anything. Ever. Recuva and others did a perfectly wonderful job of it.
 
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