In cleaning out memory cards for the Florida trip, I somehow accidentally deleted about 1,300 pictures and videos from a folder on my hard drive. They were not in my Recycle Bin, so after a little research I found Recuva. Recuva is a nice little free utility for recovering deleted files. I loaded it and put it to work. It is easy to use and it recovered what I believe is to be all the files. It did have a message about a couple of them being difficult (or something like that), but as far as I can tell it recovered them.
So, if you do something stupid like I just did, give Recuva a try.
Note: This is not an advertisement or paid endorsement in any way.
That’s one of the main differences between macs and pcs. Macs may handle almost everything else better, but if you delete something on a Mac… it’s gone. Absolutely permanently. Something’s different about the way they treat deleted files.
Probably completely unrelated, but any idea why there are so few posts for 2004 at the old site? I was doing some digging around the other day to see if I could remember when I first came to B&P which was probably early 2006, but I don’t remember seeing only 3 posts for all of 2004 before. Is there an expiration date on posts?
no…that was completely unrelated. 😉
Scott,
I’ll look into that when I get time. Heading to the3 airport now. Something is wrong if there were only a few posts. I didn’t post as many then as I do now, but I was posting almost every day then I think. I don’t think they “expire” unless I stop paying hosting fees. Then they’d expire real fast.
Oops, I accidentally the planet.
I wonder if it will work for the economy.
Recuva saved my life when my hard drive on my old laptop crapped out. I just took the hard drive out of my old laptop, got a USB adapter, plugged it into another computer, and Recuva got EVERYTHING back. I’d recommend this program in a heartbeat!
It’s programs like these that scare the hell out of me when I think of the old computers I’ve discarded with supposedly “erased” hard drives on them. Now we all know to take them out, drill holes in them or otherwise dynamite the physical.
PopCollector, one place I know drives over them with a bulldozer.
Unless things have changed, the way delete works is that an erase basically deletes the first letter of the filename and then marks the space available in the file allocation table. Then, the system will write to that location when it needs to and the file is gone. With the old Norton Utilities, you’d just go back in and put in a first letter and voila, the file was back if it hadn’t be written over. Yes, there are differences with NTFS, FAT, and other file systems, but this was back when DOS 6.0 was state of the art.
Most of the time now, folks just use a degaussing wand, a very strong magnet to wipe the information when they’re finished with drives.
revrick315 – I was hoping to flex my geek muscle, but you beat me to it.
In the days before Windows when it was just “DOS,” it was easier to recover lost files if you knew the right way to do it. I used to, but have forgotten, but it was just going into the FAT and renaming the file so the operating system recognized it again.
Tim, there aren’t too many times I can reference using Dos 6.0 much less using MS Windows before having a mouse. I’m an old school geek. I remember taking college courses in Basic in 1972.
As a matter of fact, I think I worked the Y1K problem….
@Maoman – what’s this? mac fud? common – a file system is a file system. deleting a file on a mac makes it no more completely gone than on a PC unless you’re using security features specifically to makes this so. sure, you can’t use a windows-only utility since windows can’t see a normal mac partition properly, but there are plenty of mac apps for recovering deleted files – and linux apps at that, since linux, you know, can be easily extended to mount the HFS+ filesystem that macs use.
as a computer engineer, your post, the first reply to this, just insults me. as if there isn’t already enough fud, lies and marketting clouding up the reality of what a computer can and cannot do. bleh.
Maoman……..It is not true that you can’t recover anything from a Mac system.Recently i come up with a deleted files situation which was very important for me,i just google a find good recovery tools and finally used Stellar Phoenix Mac Recovery software which is an awesome and efficient tool to recover deleted or lost file from a mac system.The software is really an amazing Product from stellar…Just give try and you will find your recovered files or data at an instant of time.