Recovering deleted files

[Mitch D]

Earlier this week I accidently deleted some photo files I had not backed up to my laptop. Can anyone tell me if there Is a way to undelete them?

[Cybrid]

Earlier this week I accidently deleted some photo files I had not backed up to my laptop. Can anyone tell me if there Is a way to undelete them?Yes. Hard drives and flash don't really erase...They simply "forget" where the data is stored. There are far more technical details to it than that but that is a Google.

Does Formatting Really erase All Data?
It's important to remember that "format" and "delete" do not mean erase! Reformatting a disk does not erase the data on the disk, only the address tables. The good news is that if you accidentally reformat a hard disk, a computer specialist should be able to recover most or all the data that was on the disk. The bad news is that for any business or corporation that is planning to donate old computers to charity, this could pose a security risk if that computer disk drive contained confidential business information. Remember — just because you may donate the computer to charity that doesn't mean an honest person will end up with it. While that shouldn't deter you from recycling old computers in this way, it should be an incentive to ensure all business data has been completely wiped from the hard drive. Never just delete the files and assume they are gone because you can't see them on the hard drive. Businesses should at the very least run the format command to erase the hard drive. The safest method to completely remove data is to overwrite the disk. You can do this yourself, although it is quite time consuming. To overwrite the disk would mean to format, then fill the disk completely with data, and format again. The easiest way to do this is to use a software program that will overwrite the disk for you. Most of these programs, which are often referred to as "Data Dump" software, will meet even the strict deletion requirements of the U.S. military. As an added bonus, a few good data dump programs can be freely downloaded from the Internet.

Several Data Dump programs can be found in our list of reference links below.

Did You Know...
In 2003 two MIT students purchased 158 used disk drives from various locations and found more than 5,000 credit card numbers, medical reports, detailed personal and corporate financial information, and several gigabytes worth of personal e-mail and pornography on those drives. Source (http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Hardware_Software/2005/harddrive_format.asp)



As long as you have not run a scrubbing program like Eraser (http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/). Any data can be recovered. There are downloadable trials of this type of software and not having used any I am loathe to recommend on over the other.
A google again will fix that. (http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=photo+recovery&meta=)

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Google for "data recovery" - as Cybrid says, there's lots of options. And whatever you do, don't write any files to the media where your photos are. This will substantially improve your chances of recovery (although if it's to onboard ROM, there's not a whole lot you can do about that).