I lost all my photos

[DC Dawg]

Before I offer my condolences, let me offer the following suggestion:

 

First, shutdown every program. Clear out as much stuff out of your system tray with the exception of the anti-virus program. And unplug your system from the network. This works best on a quiet system.

 

If you are running Windows NT, XP, or Vista, double click on the "My Computer" icon on your desk top and open Windows Explorer. If you are not using one of these operating systems, you're out of luck, sorry.

 

In Windows Explorer, right click on the listing for your C: drive and select "Properties" at the bottom of that pop-up menu. At the top of the pop-up window, select the tab that says "Tools."

 

Under the Tools window, the first option is for "Error Checking." Press the button that says "Check Now..." If there are any disconnected files, files that may have been corrupted and not properly deallocated, or for whatever other reasons, this will find them.

 

If there are files to recover, it will give them a funny name (like "FILECK####" or something like that) and place them in the root directory of your C: drive. You will then have to go through each file, change the file extensions and try to open each to see if you found something.

 

Third-party programs may not help in this case unless you are running an older FAT-32 file system. But I doubt that since the default format for Windows NT, XP, and Vista is NTFS. In order for the third-party programs to work, they must install a "driver" that traps disk writes and journal them to a "hold area" for them to manage. In the context of the recoverable trash, a program like the one offered by Symantec just "plays games" with the file allocation information from your system, freeing up disk blocks as needed. Depending on how full your system was at the time, you may or may not be able to "recover" deleted files.

 

In fact, because Microsoft tightened the security of Vista and closed the holes that were exploited by the Symantecs of the world to play these games, most of these programs do not work well under Vista. The trash managers do work because they are not reliant on these OS "holes" to work.

 

If the Error Check option does not work, you're out of luck. Sorry!

 

For the future, I recommend:

1. If you do not have a DVD-RW drive, you should buy one. Nowadays, you can find them cheap online or even in a store like Best Buy. If you have a laptop, an external DVD-RW drive with a USB interface would work.

 

If you have a choice, you will see drives marked as DVD+/-RW (as in plus-or-minus). Those usually offer the most formatting options and most compatibility. As for which is better, that's a religious war I do not want to get into. I just go for the combo version that offers the most options. I would stay away from drives marked "double layered." Most follow a standard that was never agreed to and may not work in other systems. There are physical limitation to double layered drives that are just not worth the hassle. Stay with the single layered drives!

 

2. Purchase DVD-RW or DVD+RW disks. Blank disks seem to always go on sale at least once per month!

 

3. If you do not have a DVD burning program or you do not get one with a drive, I recommend Roxio Creator 10. Currently, if you buy it from Amazon.com, you can purchase it for $79 and get a $20 rebate!

 

4. Once you recover your pictures and get them organized, copy them to a DVD! In fact, make two copies... one to keep with you in case something happens and one stored somewhere else in case something worse happens!

 

Creator 10 comes with Creator Classic, a backup manager that is pretty good. If you don't have Creator and if you are running Windows XP, you may want to consider a backup schedule. This article from Microsoft will help you use Microsoft's built in backup program.

 

ALTERNATIVE (and my personal highly recommended suggestion): Buy a Mac with MacOS X 10.5.whatever with an external drive (it is easy to recycle drives using USB and firewire-based enclosures), and run Apple's Time Machine, their automatic backup facility. It is easy and, like a lot of Apple stuff, just works. Time Machine has saved me at least twice since 10.5's release. My next machine will be a 3.06 MHz dual core iMac with a one terabyte internal disk.Sweet!

 

Scott

[WinstonWare]

What is your "D" drive? Is that a second internal or external hard drive? If it is you can go to start->search->"All files and folders->then type "*.jpg" or whatever format they were e.g. *.bmp, *.gif, whatever That will find all the files of that type on your computer. Lemme know if you have any questions.

 

Best of luck!