External Hard Drive Issue

Hello all.

I transferred all files from my current laptop to an external hard drive. I then recovered my old laptop and transferred the pictures from that computer to the hard drive as well. I was just looking for photos from a shoot and realized the photos from my current laptop are no longer on the hard drive. Is there anything I can do about this? I lost around 40 gb's of photos..

So if I interpret correctly...

1. Newlaptop files ----> external HD, then
2. Oldlaptop files ----> external HD
3. after #2, files from #1 no longer found on harddrive

That should not be the case normally, unless you copied FolderA from Newlaptop, then copied FolderA from Oldlaptop, causing FolderA to replace FolderA...you overwrote the exact same name folder (or individual files) from two plcase, causing one to overwrite the other.

If, after copying files from LaptopA to HD, you 'erased' the files from LaptopA, if you did not yet 'Empty Recycle Bin', you can recover the deleted files/folder in LaptopA back to their original folder locations. Simply Left Click on the Recycle Bin desktop icon to open it, then select the file(s) and Right Click and choose 'Restore' from the menu that pops up.

Look at the amount of space used on the external drive. Does the amount of data equal to that of the content transferred from your old laptop only, or does it equal to that of the content from both laptops? If the latter, then your data is somewhere on the hard drive.

In the worst case scenario, you can use a disk recovery program to recover the files from you laptop or external, as long as you didn't write over them.

Good luck, it's always a nightmare when this happens.

KatieMarie99 wrote in post #15435150
Hello all.

I transferred all files from my current laptop to an external hard drive. I then recovered my old laptop and transferred the pictures from that computer to the hard drive as well. I was just looking for photos from a shoot and realized the photos from my current laptop are no longer on the hard drive. Is there anything I can do about this? I lost around 40 gb's of photos..

KatieMarie99 wrote in post #15448560
If the files were overwritten, does this mean it is impossible to get them back?

Any files which are 'deleted' (Delete command, or overwritten by another file with same name) actually are still within the directory of the harddrive, but with one (or two?) special characters written in place of the real characters at the beginning of the file name so they are flagged 'no longer in use'. So 'undelete' is accomplished by changing the special character back to an alpha-numeric character, and the rest of the original file name is restored the way it was. Programs are available to do this.

The real issue is whether any of the actual file data had been overwritten after the first file was marked 'no longer in use'. If not, the original data can be recovered; but if overwritten in part or whole, the directory pointer to the data will not be valid and the file is unrecoverable.

Note to self: When shifting data to a new disk, always put it into a separate, unique folder, then back that disk up to a separate disk.

Try a file recovery program.