Help major Nightmare

have been having issues with pc so decided to restore my dell laptop back to factory settings i.e settings and operating system. NOT A FULL WIPE used the restore function that said it would not overite or delete personal files.. guess what it did, I have lost everything that was on my laptop. every folder that was on my desktop all my photos and videos of the cars all my documents i had been building up of costs and including all the documented history for the mini.

Does anybody have or can reccomend and good program that can retrieve them from the hardrive ???

Send Psymon a pm/ He's your man! :yesnod:

For the future.. I always email important docs and pics to myself. That way they're always safe in cyberspace and accessible anywhere with internet. :yesnod:

Good luck Jac.

You night be able to recover some files I've had to do it for work mate when people have tried to cover their tracks (but I proved otherwise....). I'd recommend box.net online storage you get 50gb of free space.. if psymon doesn't have anything I will copy you the disc I used n then send it over in the post tomorrow for you. But as hard drives wright data in blocks you night loose some data.

I'll have a look tomorrow for you but I'm recovering from a 14hr pint fuelled stag do so not the best of help at the minute.

jac114 wrote: have been having issues with pc so decided to restore my dell laptop back to factory settings i.e settings and operating system. NOT A FULL WIPE used the restore function that said it would not overite or delete personal files.. guess what it did, I have lost everything that was on my laptop. every folder that was on my desktop all my photos and videos of the cars all my documents i had been building up of costs and including all the documented history for the mini.

Does anybody have or can reccomend and good program that can retrieve them from the hardrive ???

Jac,

You may have got lucky.... The "factory restore" may have just created a new User account (Did it prompt you for a new username?). In which case, all of your old files will still be within the old user folder.

Example (OLD USER = "jac", NEW USER AFTER RESTORE = "Bob")
1. Go into C:\Users
2. Look for a "jac" folder, this is the OLD user account....
3. inside there will be a documents folder, with subfolders for all your stuff.

Let this be a golden rule, never trust what you are told, and always have a backup

And always test a backup before being totally happy. I use a combination of redo (bare metal backup) and crashplan (snapshots) and box.net sync. I'm a geek and have a 3 stage backup because hard drives are cheap. Takes a bit to get them all working happily but worth it when you get a blue screen of doom or a hard drive failure.

I used something called Stella drive recovery and recovered loads of deleted stuff Craig. Happy to send you a copy / upload it to the net and link you to it for "evaluation purposes".

AS others have said Backup and Backup again

Basic rule of thumb should be.... Could I live with out it/would I cry if it was lost

If answers are No/Yes then you need to back it up, and also as Ben has said look for an online back up solution like Microsoft Skydrive, Dropbox all free for small stuff and not too expensive for more space, or you can buy a small Network Attached Storage (NAS) box for around £100 or so

whatever you do dont use that drive , till data has been recovered of it it is possible but some may still be lost......
Paul D

I know it's to late now but it should have asked you for a reset date also and that way you lose nowt the reset dates are nornaly 3-5-7 days ago