Need help desperately!

[mishie]

Hi there!

I specially joined this forum because I'm looking for help from people who know the product, so I'm praying that you can.

So I did an AVG Tuneup on my laptop and it went and deleted EVERY.SINGLE.FILE (Photos, music, documents - you.name.it) and I am hysterical because this laptop also contains valuable info to my business I need!
AVG's rescue thingy didn't work and to my horror I discovered that it deleting files is not a rare problem.
So someone suggested recuva, but now I have no idea how these files (should recuva manage to recover them) will look.
Will they be intact? 
I once ran a recovery program on a friend's PC and it recovered files in a million pieces which I am way to stupid to put back together or figure out what the hell was going on. Eventually we just cut our losses and moved on.

So... will my files be idiot-proof recovered so I can use them immediately or do I need a specialist?

Sorry 'bout the rambling but my stress-levels are + - through the roof right now.

Thanks in advance.  

 

[DennisD]

Hi mishie, and welcome to the forum.

 

Can I say that I'm really sorry to hear of your troubles.

 

Will they be intact?

 

So... will my files be idiot-proof recovered so I can use them immediately or do I need a specialist?

 

 

Sad to say, recovering deleted files isn't an exact science, so all you can do is try.

 

What I would suggest, before you scan with Recuva, is firstly ...

 

Go into "Options/General" and in the "View Mode" box select "Tree View". This will display the results of your scan in a tree view folder structure, similar to the folder structure the lost files originally resided in.

 

This will enable you to select the folder/files you need to recover rather than have a long list of files you would have to either sort through, or recover every file found.

 

Secondly ...

 

Go into "Options/Actions" and select "Restore folder structure". This will save any recovered files/folders into a copy of their original location (folders/subfolders) on whichever drive you recover them to.

 

And please note, you must restore to a separate drive, or a completely separate partition on the same drive, otherwise you risk overwriting the files you are trying to recover.

 

As I say, there's no magic bullet in file recovery, but give that a try and let us know how you get on.

 

Good luck.