help please
 

My lap top froze last night and the only way i could re-boot it was to unplug it and remove the battery. when i went to start it a message came up which said something like corrupt file highly reccomend you run recovery now, press here to recover, which i did. then at restart all my settings have gone back to how they were when it was new,all the files are empty and all my photos have gone,my email account has dissapered,my security gone,everything.im really gutted about the photos
is there any way of getting them all back?
its an amilo desk top with vista.
thanks in advance guys.

Worst case is that the "recovery" has wiped the disk, but it is possible that a new installation of Windows has been created "alongside" or "over" the existing, leaving the existing user accounts intact, but not directly accessible - except to administrator accounts. When you log in, you may be using the same account name as before, but it is actually a different account.

Can you navigate to C:\Documents and Settings? What user accounts are in there?

Can you recall the name of a file that you can no longer find? Try searching the entire disk for it (including hidden and system files).

If your "stuff" is still there under your "old" account name you are in luck.

Now go out and buy yourself a 1TB external hard disk to do some regular backups with. Even if you have been unlucky, the advice still stands.

SD

windows.old
 

You may have a folder called Windows.old on your C: drive. This will have all your documents, etc.

Some words from a website:

You can clean install Windows Vista on top of the previous operating system and still have everything available. This is possible via the Windows Vista Setup. The procedure is simple and painless. All you have to do is run the Vista setup while being logged on your current operating system. Choose to Install Now Windows Vista and simply keep clicking next at all the prompts that are presented to you.

After you enter your product key, select Custom (advanced). "The partition you selected might contain files from a previous Windows installation. If it does, these files and folders will be moved to a folder named Windows.old. You will be able to access the information in Windows.old, but you will not be able to use your previous version of Windows," is the message that Setup will display when you will choose to clean install Vista on top of your current operating system.

From your backup.

Stop using it right now to prevent further overwriting of your missing files. Use a program that can recover files from a formatted drive. Something like this: <http://www.easeus-deletedrecovery.com/>

I haven't personally used it but have had it suggested to me. Limited to recovering 1GB of data, but it's free & should give you an idea of what's recoverable.

Might be worth contacting Fujitsu.

If you ask about at PC repair shops you will find someone who will be able to recover the data. There are always ways of getting data off a wiped PC, some people are slightly hesistant to let you know just how much data they can recover.

PS Haggle on the price.

PS Haggle on the price
 

Last time I had to do this (company computer) it cost £1000.00

thanks for all the advice guy's.
found myself well out of my depth with the problems caused by this crash!
so took it to a pc doc,who ran a recovery on all my files etc and managed to rescue about 75% of my pictures,ran security checks,updates etc.cost £75.
got home tried to connect to the internet with no succsess,to cut a long story short and several calls to my b/b provider,resetting passwords,re-installing all my programmes that had been wiped etc,im now back on line 6 days later out of pocket and minus loads of photos.
lesson learnt the hard way,i would'nt wish this on anyone.
memory stick is being delivered tonight and whats left of my photo's will be transfered on it asap..
thanks again ph.

Not sure I would entrust a flash drive as a backup medium for important or personally valuable data.

Unless you happen to own one of the "industrial" variants, the reliability, performance, power consumption and operating temperature range of the consumer models varies widely. This is down to both elements used in their construction as well as software algorithms they run to deal with stuff like wear levelling.

Depending on how far you want to go, a better route might be a DD or DDD route (Disk to Disk, or Disk to Disk to DVD/CD or even USB). So make an external RAID array your primary backup, and then since CDs are cheap you might want to consider an extra level and put a copy of really important stuff onto CD or DVD.

The golden rule is 3 copies (minimum) for anything of importance to you, preferably with one copy in an "offline" format. Live + 2 backup.

thanks mixture.
a friend is sorting me out with some kinda memory thingy (cant remember what its called, my head is mashed at the moment) but he says it will store photos,etc.
and yes your quite right,from now on copys will be made to disc's,and photos will be printed off.
cheers ph.

The golden rule is 3 copies (minimum) for anything of importance to you,

Too true....I have memory sticks (one per subject), and a big external hard drive in a reasonably fireproof stainless steel case which is not immediately near the PC and not visible, either. The external hard drive gets a weekly dump of all files and a monthly True Image. Some docs are stored on google, also. My entire MP-3 music file is also on the car's hard drive, not for security but so I can play it there and gets updated every week. My MP-4 file is on a portable player.

Obsessive ? Maybe.

When finally I met my dad in my adult life, he couldn't show me any photos because his house had burned down.

[As an aside: Some years later he was gone, and I traced my 4 semi-siblings. They had almost no images of him and I was able to show them what he was like as a young man.]

Not a bit of it. You're an amateur.:}



I put the book I might finish one day onto 4 sticks, Seagate Black Armour LAN thingy. One DVD in each American son's house. I carry a SD from my camera cos it's thin, and store files on there. It takes up very little room under my driver's license. Oh, yes. It's on all the lap-tops.

I suppose there's a very high chance I'll lose one of them and someone will nick my work.

I get nagged regularly about backing up all the photos to something. There are a number of ways to secure data. The cheapest is to write it all to CD. If you do this, the best way is uncompressed files. If you opt for compressed, then make sure that it is a self extracting file. Having dumped all that data onto CD, secure them in a cool dry place. A firesafe is always a good bet. Benefit of going down the CD route is that CD readers are likely to be around for quite some time. SD cards are OK, but are more sensitive. USB sticks are neat and will hold several Gb of data , but I wouldn't bank on them as a backup device. The pricier option is go and buy another HDD and slap it in a casing Then connect it as an external drive and just do a full image copy of your hard disk.

These days, I do full-disk-image backups to an external USB drive regularly. It seems to be the most practical way to back up. USB keys don't have enough space for backups. I have two drives on the PC with 1 TB total between them, of which only a tiny fraction is in use. I take compressed backups to the external drive with Acronis TrueImage, and each backup is about 31 GB in size (both disks combined). It is possible to completely restore a drive from a backup in about 15 minutes.

I also have multiple copies of key backups on different external drives, and multiple generations of backups.

Even so, a few years ago I lost 1200 film scans when I had to replace a drive on another machine for which I didn't have a backup (at the time I was backing up to tape and backing up that volume of data to tape was problematic enough that I didn't do it very often). I still have the original slides and negatives (which was one reason why I was casual about backups), but scanning them again would take a long time and I haven't bothered.

The problem with other drives is two-fold.

Break in. They will take anything with wires attached. Nice neighborhood, but my son's neighbor - a lonely old man - had his tv stolen among other things. Every draw in the house was pulled out. They punched the front door in, and drove off with the 50 telly on the roof of their car!

Like that, even a hidden backup might just go.


Electrical. Following my 2hours of explosive mains shorting the other night, I think it possible all electronics could have been spiked to destruction. All the drive electronics, and devices like my Seagate Black Armor are all vulnerable.


Then of course, there's the flood line.


It's be'n so cheerful as keeps me goin' :uhoh:

And as I said to someone some time ago '...and lets just pretend for a moment that I hadn't made a back up....?'

even a hidden backup might just go.


Thieves: My hidden hard drive has an extremely loose usb connection to it. This 'join' regularly comes apart and falls down behind my desk, even when I'm not touching it, so hopefully when the thieves come it will do the same and not be noticed. Although the way life is, that'll be the one time when it DOESN'T come apart !

Flooding: not at our 600' level

Power: a few years ago one of the three phase cables to this house "came apart" where the cables enter the house and fell acros the 'return' lead. What fun that was. Loud, smelly and showers of sparks. Being Spain the people who connected the house to the street three phase many years ago just twisted the wires together and taped the joins over....hence the other thing one needs as well as backups is a UPS with inbuilt filter.

And that's why they invented surge protectors.

Only if it's a data variant. The normal ones get too hot to be useful.

There are many online storage systems such as Dropbox which gives you 2gb free before you start paying. Dropbox (and similar sites) can also allow some access to others for sharing documents.

Virgin cable gives you some free data space as well, don't know about other web access providers.

You can upload unlimited pictures to photo sites. Flickr costs $25 (about £15) per year and you can mark them as private or 'family only' so you can choose who can see them. Pictures can include jpg scans of receipts and other important documents. A good way to archive your photos and you don't have to post or e-mail family photos because they can see and print them online.