Help! Lost files on hard drive

I have accidentally deleted files on my hard drive. The drive has not been written over but they are CR2 files from my camera. What software to use?

I've used Recuva with success.

KeithS wrote in post #16479718
I've used Recuva with success.

I ran that software but I could not get it to pull CR2 files

I've had great success with PhotoRec, which is free and can recover CR2 files along with 400 other filetypes:

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

As long as you don't write over the drive by adding new files, your chances of recovering the photos are excellent.

I'm not sure of your tech knowledge, so forgive me if I state the obvious, but if these files are critical to you, your best option is to turn off the computer that you deleted the files on and remove that hard drive and don't use it any more until you have the files restored.

Continuing to use the computer could have the sectors where the information was recorded overwritten by something such as page files, disk defragmentation, temporary files that read and write to disk, and a variety of other methods. Obviously the chances of this differ depending on a mountain of situations including free HDD space, operating system, resident software that's installed etc.

Best practice is to remove the HDD from the computer and use a second computer to restore the photo's with. (Plugging that HDD into the 2nd computer as a secondary hard drive, or using a USB docking station, etc).

If this is not possible or practical, you're best to do the recovery as quick as you can before using your computer for anything else.

Have you looked in the trash before using a recovery program?Option #2 is to use your backups to restore the images. It's easier than a recovery program as the names should also come back. Last resort should be some form of recovery software.

gjl711 wrote in post #16480238
Option #2 is to use your backups to restore the images.

And if you don't have backups I hope you'll take this experience as a warning that you really need to implement a decent backup strategy for when you lose everything on your hard drive. Yup, 'when', not 'if'.

zantop wrote in post #16480157
I've had great success with PhotoRec, which is free and can recover CR2 files along with 400 other filetypes:

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

As long as you don't write over the drive by adding new files, your chances of recovering the photos are excellent.

Windows is doing a good job of overwriting any files erased from the system partition.

So it is always best to have a separate data disk.

Next thing is that it is far better to use a stand-alone boot disk when trying to recover files, instead of having a running OS with lots of services and auto-starting applications constantly making use of the disk.

adza77 wrote in post #16480225
I'm not sure of your tech knowledge, so forgive me if I state the obvious, but if these files are critical to you, your best option is to turn off the computer that you deleted the files on and remove that hard drive and don't use it any more until you have the files restored.

Continuing to use the computer could have the sectors where the information was recorded overwritten by something such as page files, disk defragmentation, temporary files that read and write to disk, and a variety of other methods. Obviously the chances of this differ depending on a mountain of situations including free HDD space, operating system, resident software that's installed etc.

Best practice is to remove the HDD from the computer and use a second computer to restore the photo's with. (Plugging that HDD into the 2nd computer as a secondary hard drive, or using a USB docking station, etc).

If this is not possible or practical, you're best to do the recovery as quick as you can before using your computer for anything else.

gjl711 wrote in post #16480238
Have you looked in the trash before using a recovery program?Option #2 is to use your backups to restore the images. It's easier than a recovery program as the names should also come back. Last resort should be some form of recovery software.

hollis_f wrote in post #16480737
And if you don't have backups I hope you'll take this experience as a warning that you really need to implement a decent backup strategy for when you lose everything on your hard drive. Yup, 'when', not 'if'.

The drive is one of five that is only used for storage. nothing is being written to it. I was running a backup program and change a setting by accident and the drives matched files and deleted anything that was not on both disk.

I am going to run programs on both disk the original and the backup disk. I have got a lot of the jpg files back but I am pulling any CR2 files.