Hi, I really messed up with my wife's laptop. It was running so slowly and accessing the internet was painful. So I ran the disc cleanup facility, then defragged the hard drive and finally updated VLC, Flash and a number of other outdated plugins. It turns out that during the disc cleanup process, 65,000 images and videos of our kids got deleted. She was livid as you can imagine, the data is not backed up. She took the laptop to PC World who said the data was lost irretrievably because of the actions after the initial data loss. Now she hates me as you can imagine and she won't take my advice to get the hd checked out by Krollontrack. I contacted Krollontrack and they told me that it's still possible they could recover the data.

Is my wife right to accept PC World's diagnosis without a second opinion or am I deluded and hanging onto hope where there is none? Many thanks for any responses.

No, sorry she is not right. it is certainly possible that Kroll could retrieve something. Especially given that the Hard disk isn't likely faulty. And I would NOT mention it to her, knowing quite a bit about marital politics, but Why would such important data not have a backup?

If you can afford it, I would take it there for sure, and NOT use the laptop in the meantime.

If you are anywhere near Peterborough, try pcimage from this forum, he is recommended and can tell you precisely what the go is after looking at the drive.

If the files were deleted, and the disc subsequently defragmented, then this would most probably have scrambled everything.

That said, what exactly did the "disc cleanup" do? Was it not an interactive process?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

did PC World attempt recovery or just give that opinion after you described the action you took?

Here is one unlikely scenario where a total recovery may be possible, albeit without filenames.


before cleanup

OS and application files
user data + temp files
unfragmented photos

after cleanup

OS and application files
user data + holes
deleted photos

after defrag

OS and application files
defragmented user data
one large contiguous hole
deleted photos

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I guess if it depends on whether she would rather hold the fact that the husband (possibly) made a mistake, and have that in the arsenal for weaponising during any future conflicts, or she actually wants the photos back. if they are really that important, why not try every opportunity to get them back? Yes it is a very hard thing to deal with, very stressful and upsetting to lose the pictures..but having been on the receiving end of a similar story(thanks Office2013 and your inability to work out how to do IMAP), I can say that sometimes, it has nothing to do with the computer... I really don't like touching her PC...

Reminds me of a book about Martians and Venutians (and yes Ive taken precautions - there are no ladies in the room!)

This is a perfect example of Software vendors giving tools(cleanup, defrag, uninstalling, plugin technology, "libraries" albums, etc) an abstracting things and making things so complex that the average Joe that really just uses a computer would have no idea what each of those tools really do. The OP was probably using each tool how he believed was the correct way, and a "clean-up" of a PC is a very individual thing.. a follow your nose situation. you learn through the years what to leave alone, and what to delete.

The way I see it is that the defrag process would have compacted all the data and pushed it to the front of the drive.

Let's say that the drive has a capacity of 1TB, and that after the defrag there is 700GB of used space and 300GB of free space. The 300GB of free space would be at the end of the drive, and that would be the only place where any photos could have survived. Anything that existed in the 700GB area would have been overwritten. ISTM that, under such circumstances, there would be nothing that any professional could do that an intelligent user couldn't do with a tool such as R-Studio.

I would clone the drive, sector by sector, and then attempt a raw recovery against the free space. I certainly wouldn't be going to Kroll Ontrack for this job. The fact that the OP is considering such an option is indicative of his desperation, and this makes him vulnerable. Better to put the drive aside, keep a cool head, and then approach the problem when the desperation subsides.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Get it professionally recovered, far cheaper alternatives to Kroll Ontrack though. Just research on Google.

Photorec is a freeware tool that can be configured to search for image files in free space. Might be worth a try ...

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

fzabkar,

Defrag does not always move data towards front of the drive. Quite often it is content with leaving larger holes where they are, large contiguous files where they are, and only consolidates small files and small holes. That is for values of small around 1..10MB maybe.

If this user is not really savvy he could mess it up more. I don't know what the chances of recovery is, and getting him to run software if he is inexperienced can be a bad thing.

The fact that he hasn't responded could mean a number of things.

In any case, no-one has suggested to remove the drive from the laptop. Franc has said clone the drive, and I know he means remove it and clone it, but does the OP? My guess, judging on the wording "took the laptop to PC World" is that he would install the recovery software on the same system and try it.

That's why I suggested take it to a Pro. Not necessarily Kroll, but I think pcimage would be fair at least, and not make mistakes like the OP might.

I agree with Franc that it should have been a similar chance Pro v Freeware tools, but given the users tone I dont think it is all that safe for him to do any more..

ݭ

Hi all, thank you very much for your responses, much appreciated. I have used disc cleanup on my own pc many times in the past without any issue so I have no idea how it can all of a sudden wipe thousands of images and videos from folders which are in active use. Not backing her data up before performing the cleanup was totally on me though so I have to accept responsibility for that. She isn't allowing me anywhere near the laptop so performing any further actions myself is out of the question, not that I want to tbh. I was hoping to be able to show her some posts on here which would convince her to get the hd looked at by a data recovery company because I'm quite willing to pay my way out of the situation. However as much as I agree with a couple of responses, I think that showing her them might do me more harm than good. So I think I'm just going to keep my offer open to her and let her get on with it and I'll just have to accept that I'm never going to hear the end of this for the rest of my life! Once again, thanks a lot guys for taking the time to respond to my post.

Can anyone recommend a DR co cheaper than Krollontrack but with a good track record? I know pcimage was mentioned but we live down in Poole. There are so many DR companies online and many are cowboys from the research I've done. Krollontrack had really good customer recommendations which is why I was referring to them.

I agree with Franc that it should have been a similar chance Pro v Freeware tools, but given the users tone I dont think it is all that safe for him to do any more..

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Not if I want to risk having a vasectomy performed by my wife, with pain control being very low down on her list of priorities!!!!

I feel your pain.

Sometimes cleanup can decide that files that have not been touched for a long time are unwanted. IMHO using that tool has never sit well with me.

I really hope you get some good news. Again I recommend talking with Sean at pcimage he is in Peterborough, just search the forums.

good luck

Happy to help if I can.

Although I'm in Peterborough, the post office deliver from Poole

If you like, send the Hdd up to me and I'll clone it and send it back same day, and work from the clone.

I feel your pain, so the cost won't be an arm and a leg!

Cheers!

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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I have seen a similar issue with a colleague of mine. Her computer died, the Seagate HDD in another thread I posted about it. She told me the 2 backup Externals contained everything she needed, and I could try and retrieve Data from it, and the risks were acceptable as she did have existing backups.

So I rebuilt the PC with new HDD and OS. She agrees to bring backup HDD in for restore. She arrives in my office, in tears.

She had Backups from MS Backup on one disk, along with pretty much all of her family photos. She decides that she would copy the photos to a new external and leave me with the backups only on the disk. So she does a cut and paste from old to new, and puts sticky notes on the computer to leave it alone.

As she shares computer with others, another staff member came along and just clicked X.

recovery should be fine I say, but strange thing is there is no trace of the photos folder after running GDB, not a trace. She did not use the disks after the mishap. I cant understand how other folders she also transferred over are there in deleted format and can be recovered fine, bit not a single trace of the photos folder.

the backups do contain pictures, it is uncertain how much loss, but a user doing things seemingly correct can still lead to disaster.

Now it seems the HDD I played with is now important again, so I feel stupid for not just leaving it alone until all was ok, and I feel bad for the staff member that simply stopped a transfer.

Reminds me of a system I was going to work on. The lady had a bunch of iTunes stuff going - hundreds of CD rips and all that. Many years of work put into it.

So I was gonna work on it and do some optimizations and cleanups, junk removal, but as soon as I said I have to make a backup first prior to do doing anything and that it would take an hour she blew up at me and halted everything right there.

I wasn't allowed to do any optimizing or cleanups or reorganizations because if I was a true expert I wouldn't need a safety net, a backup.. I could just get on with it.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Seems lucky you didn't have to do the job, crystal ball says there would have been other "issues" with this client!

Perhaps I was overly pessimistic.

I stopped defragmenting my drives many years ago because I never gained any significant benefit. Maybe today's defragging utilities use different approaches than those I'm familiar with. For example, it could be that your defragger consolidates fragmented files without consolidating free space. If so, then that would give you a much better chance of recovering something.

If defragging was a relatively quick process rather an overnight run, then this would tend to confirm that my initial assessment was wrong.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.