Photos lost

[peregrinus]

in the midst of having multiple windows open and making a new backup of all my pictures, i somehow managed to accidentally delete my actual folder on a spare drive with all my photos for the last few years.

 

it popped up saying too large for recycle bin delete permanently. and thinking i was in my spare folder, not my main folder hit yes.

loading up the drive in recuva loads up all 6683 pictures, and 99% of them say not overwritten and in excellent condition, it happpened less than an hour ago.

 

about 10-15 files say they were overwritten by system volume. but the rest say they are fine, but they ALL show up as not able to be previewed and restore in a not working state.

 

is there anything i can do to try to make this work?

 

its an SSD drive, NTFS formated partition that was only used as my backup drive.

 

only thing i really wish to recover is all the pics from the birth of my first baby, the rest is just a bonus if i get anything else.  am i up crap creek?  because a few of the files got overwritten they are all trash now ? or what! if you need more info please ask!  thanks for any help!

[peregrinus]

looks like the header info for each picture is entirely zeroed out. im assume i am s**t out of luck?

[Augeas]

I don't have any good news. SSD's are a nightmare for recovery, too clever for their (or our) own good.

When a file is deleted on an SSD a TRIM command is sent to the SSD which tells the device controller that the pages are no longer needed. The controller then unmaps those pages (and effectively replaces them with a page of zeroes). At that point the previous data is irretrievably lost. I think that this explains the zeroes in the headers.

If the device were USB attached then the TRIM command might not be passed to the controller, and there would be a chance of recovery, but the zeroes do not bode well.

Files are listed because Recuva reads the MFT and gets the file list and page addresses from there (TRIM does not touch the contents of the MFT). Unfortunately the address of the old data is of no use.

Have you put any filter i your scan? If so I would rescan with no filter at all so you retrieve all deleted files. Did you run a deep scan? If not do so (yes, with no filter). You might find some edit copies etc.

Do you have any shadow copies listed in Recuva? If so I would scan these. In advanced Mode Options/Actions check scan for non-deleted files, again not putting any filter in the scan. After the scan enter yourname\documents in the filter box to reduce the list. I have tried this and the results were not as good as I expected, with most pics chopped or distorted.

As soon as you find anything recover it to a folder on another drive.

Good luck.

 

[peregrinus]

yeah i assumed it was a lost cause soon as i realized all the info was zero'd out.

the backup folder was all that was on the drive, so not much else to find, i did do a full deep scan and all that as mentioned sadly.

 

really sucks to lose the baby pics, i was hoping maybe, thanks for the help!