Deleted My Documents By Accident!

Hello,

I was wondering if someone can help me. I made a massive mistake i accidently deleted My Documents, which had a number of folders and personal documents along with video and pic files. I was trying to delete a single folder within My Documents and somehow the whole thing got deleted. I went to my recycle bin and nothing was in there.

Is there anyway i can recover My Documents? Any help would be so much appreciated.

Kind Regards

 

You can use some file recovery software. There are many free versions available on the net, but paid versions are better.

Also if you are using vista business or ultimate there is backup software built into it that would bring the files back.

 

Which drive was it on?

Try www.recuva.com

 

First, I hope you didnt use your harddrive after deleting your Documents :S
Second use this to recover the deleted files:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.HTML

Edit: I guess I was a bit late, but this software is still pretty useful, and it's free!

 

I am using Vista Home.

I will try recuva. I am hoping this works.

Thanks for your help so far, it is appreciated.

 

What do you mean? I did try going in to recycle bin and also in to C: to see if it was still there.

I will try the software which you have requested, if recuva does not work. It is currently searching for deleted files.

 

+1 for recuva!

G!

 

I mean that if you write more data into the harddrive, it might have over written what was originally in it :S but I doubt simply going into the recycling bin and browsing folders effects it.

Hope the software works for you too, Good Luck!

 

don't do any general cleanups e.g disk cleanups/ccleaners

 

Well recuva did work. It bought up like 70,000+ files and it takes too long to look through them. Though all the files in that list cannot be recovered. So i selected all rather then go through them as i cannot remember all the files.
This looks like it is gonna take some time. Thanks again for your help everyone.

It would have been easier if somehow i was able to select folders rather then individual files, ah well.

 

Yeah, but thats not how a hard drive works.

 

The program I linked you could select folders instead of individual files :S
O CRAP, did I mention to recover them into a different harddrive instead of the one they were in, in the first place? Because you might be over writing some now if you didnt

 

Try using Shadow Explorer! It only works for Vista I think since it has that shadow copy feature.

 

I have managed to recover a number of files, which is cool. I recovered them on a different drive. The problem is when i try to open the recovered files they don't seem to work. For example when i open a word file it comes up some box which says File Conversion and it asks me to select options which i do not know about. Also when i try to open a VLC file it doesn't play the video.

Why is this happening?
Also is there a recovery program which recovers documents according to date. So you can recover documents which were deleted on a certain date.

 

Oh oh Shaythong that Shadow Explorer seems really cool. I found a point which shows all my documents on 7th Nov. I can see all the documents, files and folders. The only question i have is how do i go back to that point to restore My Documents?
When i am in Shadow Explorer it doesn't really tell me anything and give me many options to go back to that point in time.

Kind Regards

 

Ok i have finally got my files and folders back though Shadow Explorer, whoo hoo! Thank you Shaythong.

I have one concern though i was not able to obtain a few files, which i was able to obtain through recuva. But they do not seem to open. For example when i try to open an excel file it says that it is in a different format then specified by the file extension. It is a xls file.

Kind Regards

 

Might be corrupted too badly then.

 

Yeah, to be honest it can be a crapshoot. Be thankful for what you managed to recover.

 

Glad you've got it to work for some files. Just like the last user said, be glad for what you've managed to recover.

 

you could try changing formats, for example .xls into .xlsx which is the new office if you have it... although I doubt it'll help...

 

If I did this, the first thing I would have tried would have been a System Restore.

 

Doesn't that mean that it won't restore files that has to do with the documents?


EDIT: Because i accidently did this a month ago, deleted some files in my documents, that never got back after a restore. Only previous settings and programs that where installed etc.

 

That wouldn't be a good idea. System Restore doesn't actually "restore" the entire machine to an earlier point in time, it just puts the guts of the OS itself back to an earlier set of files (mostly dlls) and removes system files and vendor files that hook into the system that were installed after the date to which you're restoring. It will not recover lost data files (e.g., word-processing documents, images, other media files, and the like) and, quite possibly, might completely lose track of any such files that were created after the date to which you've restored.

 

And it messes up a lot of stuff on computers along the way (sometimes worse, sometimes not too bad)

 

Yup - learned that one the hard way. Also, I've noticed that quite often, the system won't restore in the first place - what's the point of using up so much disk space saving restoration points if they end up being unuseable in the end?

 

I suspect if its a driver update that goes fatally wrong this can help saving and then backing up personal files..but even then.

I think my Restore points are switched off but it still seems to write soemthing...
(Shadow copies? Maybe...)

 

I agree; that seems to be all that "system restore" is really good for.

 

One thing I like about Vista (which is also available on XP when used with a full blown server) is the "previous versions" option.

If you delete a file or folder you can go to the next folder up, right click it and open properties on it. Under there you will find a previous versions tab and if Vista had enough space to back up the contents you can view older versions of the folder with all of the contents. This means you can just drag the deleted item back into the current folder you deleted it from OR open / restore an earlier version of a document.

Don't rely on this working though as a few different things can delete this cache of older versions.

 

Yes it can be a great feature but Shadow copy/backup is only available for Business and Ultimate.

 

Yeah if you have shadow copy I think it's really useful with the addition to it on system restore