My sample pictures folder has disappeared, how do I recover them?

Question

Woke up this morning and found that my sample pictures folder has disappeared. It had all my family photos on there. The my pictures folder is still there but not the sample pictures folder. I haven't downloaded anything recently and they are not in the recycle bin. I have tried searching for some of the files manually but no luck. Have you any idea what has happened to them and how could I retrieve them, many thanks

Answer 1

First, A system restore is just what it says, "a system restore" it will not necessarily restore everything !

Second, at the moment the odds are that all your photos are still on your hard drive, (hopefully you're not running a SSD drive)

Third, just searching may not come up with the required results, for a number of reasons, If the photos are important to you, try this :--

Don't do anything further with your hard drive, obtain a USB slot in caddy to suit the hard drive, obtain a version of photo recovery software, (there's many different types on the market) load this software on a spare or a friend's computer, plug in you're new caddy, and ask the software to search for your photos,

If it gives you a choice of the type of file, (Type, *.XXX) the Xs here should be replaced with the last three letters of of one of your camera's filenames, IE *.JPG

Over the years I have recovered many hundred's of thousands of photos for people who have misplaced them, even in cases where the drives have been fully formatted !

Answer 2

Thanks for trying to help Bob, but the first thing I did was a system restore and still no luck

Answer 3

You may try some data recovery tool, see this solution

http://www.asoftech.com/articles/shift-delete-recovery.html



hope this helps.