Tuesday, April 22, 2008 4:35 PM
If you've ever deleted a file when you should have really sent it to Recycle Bin, perhaps you have an idea of how I felt last night when I deleted 1GB worth of video files for my older son's school project. First I "lost" about a dozen files. I still have no idea what went wrong. Windows Movie Maker all of a sudden showed X's for clips. The containing folder was just empty. I had imported some additional videos into a subfolder of that one using Picasa, but I can't imagine it would just wipe out the parent during an import!
Then to make things worse, the deletion/disappearance got me thinking about files/folders that I didn't need. I deleted a few folders that I didn't need (not recycle, but SHIFT+DELETE to actually delete them). Then I did it. I accidentally deleted the remainder of his project's video clips. I just sat there for a second slack-jawed. What the #@$* is wrong with me that I just carelessly deleted more files?!
At this point I didn't know what to do. I have used undelete utilities in the past, but given how much happens in the background with Vista (and Picasa, and Windows Movie Maker) I was sure that there would be nothing left to recover. On another computer I downloaded and unpacked NTFSUndelete. I didn't expect much. It churned and churned for several hours. Actually, I had to abort it since it locked up at one point. The second time it succeeded and found my files! I couldn't believe it!
At the same time, I figured I should try to recover from the camera's memory card (FAT32). Sadly some of the files would have overwritten others due to the way we shot/uploaded/shot the clips. Since NTFSUndelete is only for NTFS volumes, I tried FreeUndelete. Miraculously this worked did the trick! A few videos couldn't be recovered, but between this recovery and what was on the hard drive, I ended up getting everything back.
Now that I think of it, I should have immediately powered down and booted with MiniPE (not sure how legit this is...). It doesn't touch the hard drive (it boots from CD) and includes some good file recovery tools on it. From within Windows though, I would definitely recommend either FreeUndelete or NTFSUndelete. They are both free and both work well. Just be sure to download them on a different computer and run them from a memory stick!
http://officerecovery.com/freeundelete/ (anything...)
http://ntfsundelete.com/ (only NTFS)