Strange files deleted, but most folders left - urgent

[acharris]

Hi all I need some advice. For some strange reason, I checked the my document folder today and noticed that some files and folders are deleted and that most folders are still there, but no files in them.

I find this strange as I used get data back and diskinternals uneraser and I managed to retreived about 93% of the stuff gone, and made up the rest from backups, but some picture files have been deleted, but left all the folder structure there.

When I use a data recovery prog I dont even see any trace of those files coming up anywhere, like they have completly disappeared from the drive. Any help is appeciated, as I think they were deleted by me by accident when I ran a command on linux "rm -rf /mnt/net" and I deleted the files that way, but no trace left on the PC. Thanks.

 

[Mattus]

If you've been using the computer since you deleted the files, there's a strong chance that new data has been written to the location where the pictures were. If that's the case, you have no chance of getting the original stuff back with a data recovery program.

Do you mean that the folders were never deleted, or that you managed to recover the folders but not the files? If the former, it's probably something to do with permissions or the precise rm command which you executed. If the latter, that's not too surprising as the folders were probably stored in a different location on the disk to the files, so they might not have been overwritten. Either way, the presence of the folders isn't going to help you get the files back.