Possible Disaster

September 15, 2006 12:55 PM

Are my files gone forever???

I had to do a whole system restore on my Win XP pc and it put every bit of my old files into a directory on C called My Backup and the date. The restore worked and pc running fine. I was even able to move a couple of subdirectories from c:mybackup to c:. Now, however, I see that none of my pictures or my itunes songs are there to bring back. Are they lost forever?

posted by turtle42 to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Yikes! Nightmare scenario #1. Any backup should always be done on a separate media. I think I'm going to go and back up all my data on a few cds after reading this.
posted by JJ86 at 1:04 PM on September 15, 2006

Turn off the power immediately. Take the hard drive out of the case, and put it in another PC. Do not move files onto or off of that drive until you've resolved the issue one way or another.

There are a number of disk scanning tools -- Norton makes some -- that can identify and recover 'deleted' files. It's possible that some of your pictures may be recoverable if Windows hasn't yet chosen to use the disk sectors they were written on for other purposes. Unfortunately, Windows tends to do a lot of stuff on the C: drive, so many of your pictures may be gone. The longer you leave the drive powered on in that PC, the greater the likelihood of loss.

Worst case scenario, you can send your disk to an outfit that will attempt to reconstruct your files from the magnetic signature on the platters; this is very expensive (thousands) and involves destroying the disk completely, so that's a last ditch scenario for extremely critical data.

Apple reportedly offers a one-time ability to redownload everything you've bought from itunes in the case of a major catastrophe like this, so you could be covered there if that's a major loss.
posted by felix at 1:40 PM on September 15, 2006

turtle42; you say you "put every bit of" your old files into the subdirectory called My Backup, and that you can see this folder and its contents.

Did you put your music and pictures into the My Backup folder explicitly?
posted by odinsdream at 3:22 PM on September 15, 2006

Try a search in the whole drive for a filename to a file you think may have been lost first. Maybe it is stored somewhere else on your computer and you just can't find it.

I am curious to the answer to odinsdream's question. How was the system restore performed? Did you tell it explicitly which folders to put into My Backup, move them there yourself, or it automatically chose?
posted by pinksoftsoap at 3:38 PM on September 15, 2006

As for software to use to try and recover your data once you've put the drive in a different system, I've had great luck with R-Studio. Get the demo version. See if it says it can recover the missing files/folders. If it can, buy a license and proceed from there. If not, save your money.
posted by Good Brain at 7:14 PM on September 15, 2006

For next time around, Non-destructive XP restoration.
posted by IndigoRain at 9:08 PM on September 15, 2006