If I system restore will recycle bin items be restored to folders?

Draeger

Draeger

Draeger

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Hi folks,

Got an issue I'm trying to sort out for a friend. His wife has managed to somehow delete an entire folder of pictures of their youngest child. Probably about 8Gb of photos. No idea how! Anyway, its landed in the Recycle Bin and when you open the Recycle Bin you can see all the files/images. But only for a split second, then the Recycle Bin appears to crash and you end up back at the desktop. The images have not yet been deleted from the Recycle Bin, they are still in there as you can still see them for a few seconds but it appears after a wee bit of Googling that if a substantially large file in Gb's is deleted and ends up in the Recycle Bin it can result in it crashing the system.

Now, I'm wondering if I carry out a restore to a previous point in time, will the items which were deleted and ended up in the Recycle Bin, be restored to their former/original folder? I'm wary of trying this out just in case it doesn't work and I lose the lot.

Any other options on how to either get the Recycle Bin to work/play ball and restore them back to their original folder? Running on a Windows 8.1 based Sony Vaio laptop.

Thanks.
 
lurkio said:
No dont use system restore

Get a USB stick (to copy recovered files to)
Get recovua https://www.piriform.com/recuva
Down load it to the memory stick and run it from there

Do not create ANY new files on the drive you want to recover the data from
Click to expand...

Hi, I'll do that and see how it goes. I did already tell him when he phoned me on Monday night in a panic that he should not use the laptop any further to read/write data to. Hopefully he listened to me.

Still curious though, if a system restore was to be carried out and it was restored back to a point prior to his wife deleting the folder, would that folder be dropped back into its original location from the Shadow Copy on the HD?
 
Just another suggestion, but before you do *anything* else - anything at all - image the hard drive in its entirety, "free" space included. Macrium Reflect's "make an exact copy of the partition" will do this, although naturally you'll need a target HDD that can accommodate the image size.

Don't install Macrium on the computer from which you're trying to rescue the files, instead install it on another computer, create a rescue USB stick, and use this to boot from to create the backup image - this way you'll minimise the chances of overwriting something irreplaceable. Then you can go ahead with your rescue attempts safe in the knowledge that whatever happens you have an identical clone of the current HDD state if/when it goes pear shaped.

It's all a bit longwinded, but I'm guessing the data is important enough to make it worthwhile.
 
Right, took an image using Macrium, so thats a bit of redundancy sorted out now.

Tried using Recuva and pointed it at the Recycle Bin, specifying image file types but its recovered about 80 odd images which are fine and maybe another 300 which are completely corrupted. However, it hasn't recovered the folder which I can see sat in there with the kids name on it which is where all the photos are. It's like Recuva has recovered images which have been properly deleted from the Recycle Bin but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get Recuva to grab the actual folder which is sitting within the Recycle Bin as it stands. Any ideas? I've also tried going into the Windows directory and copying the C:\$Recycle folder (inside which there are three further files, the last one has the 1.57Gb folder which it clearly says when you right click it and select 'Properties' but if you double click it to look inside it, it says its empty?? :( ) :-

recycle1.jpg


This is so frustrating, I can see the folder I need to grab, it's 1.57Gb in size but I can't work out how to grab it!!
 
That's disappointing that Recuva can't get them cleanly.

Have you investigated the root problem, that explorer crashes when looking at the recycle bin? I did a quick search the other day and it's not unheard of.
 
Hi,

Yeah, it seems to be a common problem but unfortunately all of the 'fixes' for it result in a working recycle bin but anything in it at the time gets deleted permanently. :(
 
If they're still in the recycle bin, are they even technically deleted?

It was my understanding that they're just moved to $Recycle on the given drive. Recuva can't recover them because they still exist.

Assuming you have a full disk image, as a last resort I'd be tempted to empty the Recycle Bin and then re-run Recuva.

Edit: There must be some kind of PE boot cd that will give you access to that folder.
 
( I had a portable drive go bad after I dropped it, and was then only able to copy off some files, I had not tried to create a disk image.)

Do you need to run a scan on the disc though, to ensure its integrity (others can confirm that is a non-destructive operation) -
presumably Macrium will also identify if the disc is bad as it will not be able to copy.

I had a glance at recuva manual , and as you say it appears it will not recover files that are still in the recycle bin. However the manual does talks about scanning for non-deleted files , but maybe you already did that.

Also when you go into the recycle bin are you just viewing a detailed list, not the preview tabs/icons which probably will throw explorer if a file is corrupt, since it will not be able to render an image
 
Hi folks, apologies for the late reply to this thread. Appreciate the responses.

I managed to recover a small amount of images and decided to go for a system restore just to see what happened. The system restore did not move the previously deleted folder from the recycle bin back to its previous location prior to being deleted. Upon running system restore, Windows informed me there were errors on the disk which needed checking. I did so from boot up and it corrected several errors. I then ran system restore and got the same result - folder concerned still resided within the recycle bin. However..........:D

I then opened the recycle bin and it seemed to open up fine initially and allow me to view the files within. So I right clicked the folder I needed to recover and selected 'Restore'. It began to do so and then the recycle bin hung and crashed Explorer again, just like before. So I then had a look in the 'My Pictures' folder and lo and behold.....the folder I needed had been fully restored. I do think though, I've just got lucky there rather than found a solution to anything in particular. I then emptied the recycle bin and all is back to normal. That said, I've strongly suggested to my friend that she backs up all important files and folders just in case her HD goes south. Hopefully she will take heed!

Thanks again for the replies folks. ;)
 
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