Emergency, please help!

Long Story short, my wife thought it would be funny to delete all my client files off BOTH hard drives for april fools day. Her plan was to copy them onto a network drive, but she cancelled the copy because "it was gonna take too long"

She is on the verge of death, and I am super pisstoff. My whole portflio, and about $1100 worth of unfulfilled orders for clients. all I have is my Smugmug galleries to fall back on.

Is there any way in windows to recover all this from 2 days ago? If i regress the system with system restore, will I get documents back? Supposedly the docs aren't really gone till they are overwritten... is that true?

Please save her life.

System restore won't recover the files, an undelete utility may. DON'T DO ANYTHING THAT WRITES DATA TO THE DRIVE IF YOU CAN HELP IT. I haven't used Windows in ages, so just hold on a little longer and someone with more experience can point you to a decent undelete program. Also, I very strongly suggest DVD backup henceforth.

If the OS is still on the hard drive, try this one: http://www.pcinspector​.de/file_recovery/UK/w​elcome.htm

It saved my once! Good luck.

right click on the recycle bin and choose restore file.
Dick

Not sure about which programs would be best, but when you download, download it to a USB if possible to avoid any writing to the hard drive. You should have no problem running these programs from USB, at least I would not think anyways.

http://www.recovermyfi​les.com/ (saved my butt more than once, and the last time was on Sat with 6GB of RAW pics that screwed up when trying to copy to my imagetank!) well worth the money!

As previously stated, Windows System Restore WILL NOT restore deleted user created files. It only effects changes to drivers or the registry.

Your only option would be to use a recovery program as previously posted.

Then password protect your computer.

Thanks for all the help. The recycle bin thing is no good, she dumped that too. I will give this a try. any other tips are appreciated.

Wow... april fools indeed!

There are utilities that restore erased data. I never had to experience them.

My advice is to turn that computer off and then run the utility off another computer.

On the bright side... Most of april fool days just blend into each other. This one you'll remember.

1 word
Why?

JaGWiRE wrote in post #2975330
1 word
Why?

lol that is what i kept repeating while i was beating her. I have been able to recover about 25% so far, but it is all mixed together, and it is a disaster. Sooo many corrupt files.

MikeMcL wrote in post #2975948
lol that is what i kept repeating while i was beating her. I have been able to recover about 25% so far, but it is all mixed together, and it is a disaster. Sooo many corrupt files.

2 words
You're kidding?

Nah I didn't hit her... yet.

I am really mad. there is something about a person messing with your crap that gives you an icky, violated feeling. I am really mad about all this, but I should recover by using the pics at smugmug to filfill the orders. Ill have to order about $300 worth of "backup discs" from them to get my pics back. That just means I lost all the raws and the layered .psd files that i used to make the collage pages.

Im on a rant now. There will be alot more customers, eventually I will forget about this... and it's illegal to kill your wife for the insurance miney so I'll just have to move on.

Thanks for the help guys. I was able to get a bunch back, and It was a good learning experience anyways.

If you need alibi I'm here for you

I have an IOGEAR
That I back all work files on.
I have it setup so all I do is upload from card to computer working Folder and then it the button on the front of the IOGEAR and it backup the files.
Its very easy to use. If you can also set up the drive with real names i.e. Weddings, portraits etc.
This way if computer goes boom or Wife plays a not so funny April fools joke the files are backed up.

Surely this is your april fools joke on us
If not


KILL HER!