Overwritten

[Cab1997]

I accidently deleted my main folder with 1,000s of family pictures on an external 110 Gig hard drive. I have not saved ANYTHING or even Used it in the past 48 hours after the accident. I saved and am currently running recovermyfiles from my c drive on my personal computer. It is only like a 10th done after 2 hours but a lot of the files are saying overwritten. How could any of those files have been overwritten when I haven't even used the drive since the problem?

[GDH]

Hi,

A quick question so that I dont send you down the wrong path: Why are you searching your C: drive if the files were deleted from an external drive?

[Cab1997]

I meant I am performing the search from my c drive but running it ON my external.

[GDH]

One of the steps that Recover My Files takes it to look at the table at the start of your disk called the MFT table. This table contains the name of all the files on your disk, and each file record in this table points to the location on the disk where a file is stored.

As you can only have 1 file stored in any 1 location, if Recover My Files finds that two file references in the table point to the same location in the disk then it is an indication that the earlier file has been overwritten with newer data.

It is normal to find overwritten files where you run a search, because you move files around in the normal course of using your computer and Windows is constantly writing data out to your disk (and you dont have any control where Windows puts it).

You have done all the right things, by connecting the problem drive to a computer as a secondary drive, and using the C: drive of that computer to scan the secondary drive.

In your situation your should be running a Complete File Search for specific file types (I presume your photos are jpegs?). You will get two types of search result:

• Where the orignal name of the file is intact - this is where the file reference has been found in the Master File Table
• Where the file starts with the name "Recovered_..." - This is where Recover My Files has found the file by locating the unique JPEG header and footer

You should click on both types of search result to preview the content of the files found - and if you see your photos, then activate the program and save them back to your C: drive.

A good tip is to click on the "size" column heading to group all the photos of the same size together. This can make the digital camera photos easier to find in the search results.

[Cab1997]

Thanks. I did start to notice that the same named pic would show up a few times and only 1 would be the picture itself. It was still running after four hours so I abandoned the search until the weekend. I unplugged the external drive and will not use it until I can run a full search. Thanks again.