Whoops! It’s Gone
A fortnight ago, it was the first of September. At the start of every month, it has become routine to change my desktop wallpaper and take a nice screenshot which I then uploaded to Flickr. I only have a few icons permanently on my desktop, such as My Computer, TV Shows, Podcasts, Notes and the Recycling Bin. I do however use my desktop as a temporary place to put files, which either have to be used, or sorted and put somewhere else. I use the desktop because I see them there everyday and remember the task yet to be done.
So anyway, I had some extra stuff on my desktop. Some TV shows and podcasts that had to be watched and some files that needed to be attended to soon. Now I didn’t want these files on my screenshot to be uploaded to Flickr so for some reason I moved them into the recycling bin. Well the total size of all the files exceeded the recycling bin space, so most of the files I moved there got deleted. Normally I would put them in a folder and put that folder in one of the other folders that is on my desktop, but for some reason I didn’t do that this time.
As an person online would, I tweeted my stupidity for the Twitter world to see (or the friends that follow me.) I wasn’t expecting to get any of these files back and I would have to re-download the files that could be downloaded again, and the others (either unrecoverable to I forgot what I had) would just be my loss. To my surprise, my good friend Rowan replied to my tweet with a link to a piece of Windows recovery software called Recuva.
After you download and install Recuva, when you execute it, you are greeted with an easy wizard to guide you through the recovery process. You can get it to find only certain types of files, such as Pictures, Videos, Music, Documents or all files. This is good for say if you delete all the pictures off your camera memory stick. Next you can specify where the files were. If you are unsure, you can do a full scan of everything. There are two types of scans, a normal scan and a deep scan. The regular scan is faster, but it finds far less than the slower deep scan. I required a deep scan to recover my files. Then after the scan is done, you select the files you want to recover from the ones its found and you are all sweet.
Recuva managed to save most of the files I had lost, with the exception of a folder with a season of a television series, but that is easy enough to download again when I actually have time to watch it. I also lost my Notes text document. The document the software recovered was somehow corrupted and had text from an html/css document. I don’t think there was anything of great importance in it anyway. Thanks to Rowan for helping me recover, or at least identify what I had lost. The most annoying part about losing files isn’t the fact that they are gone (although it is annoying,) it’s the fact that you don’t know what you have lost. Well that applies for me anyway.
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I’m full of weird knowledge on really random programs and websites. Glad you were able to recover most of your stuff. When you delete files, Windows doesn’t get rid of it (as i’m sure you know), so if you use Recuva fast enough, before deleting MORE things (windows replaces the newly deleted files with the older deleted files eventually) you can usually get everything back. It’s a really handy tool. From the makers of CCleaner and such. Anyways, try not to do that again
later buddy.
Also: i love your blog’s theme.
I have done this once before, but with my USB drive.
I always have an up to date copy of my school documents on both my USB and my computer. I do all the work off my USB and every day after school I update my computer to match.
The only day I did not do this I ended up losing a days work of an assignment.
At school I was working on my IPT game programming assignment. During that lesson I finished off typing the written part of the assignment. Then I made another copy of my game so I could change some files to make it run with the Visual Basic.net 2005 on the school computer (I have VB.net 2008 at home but the school has VB.net 2005, which will not open what I had made so far). It worked so I deleted the folder containing the original program. That folder still had the written part inside it :O
Oh well, not much damage done, but I still had to go home and type up all that stuff again
Nice article. That app looks interesting. I’m a bit paranoid, though: I don’t like how it can recover stuff I’ve deleted even from the Recycle Bin. I think this post is going to get me to use Eraser more, now, and do secure deletes.
Data recovery ftl! — because if you can recover it, so can the feds.
zzap:
just the occasional dban will do the trick!