At a loss and overwhelmed....

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
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TSaha125
Posts: 2
Joined: 25 Jan 2018, 18:29

At a loss and overwhelmed....

#1 Post by TSaha125 »

Hi, I'm sure this has been answered over and over but I've searched through several pages and I'm not sure I'm understanding how to do this file recovery.

Background: I am in IT but i'm not a hardware person so sectors, partition etc is a foreign language to me.
Issue: Unbeknownst to me, about 6 weeks ago, I had deleted a group of videos going back 2 years (maybe about 15-20 of them). I didn't realize this until 4 weeks later (2 wks ago) and by then, I had erased my recycle bin.

I have tried to recover the data using R-Studio, Recuva and now I tried PhotoRec. I'm getting some files (I'm only looking for video files) but not the ones I am looking for.

I tried running PhotoRec but not sure I did it right. I originally ran it with block size of the whole disk. It stalled. So I restarted and made the block size 512. It seemed to go faster but it's still hanging. Now when I close out and go back in, it always asks me if I want to continue previous session.

Am I doing something wrong here? I'm hesitant to use TestDisk b/c that seems more complicated than this. But if you think that is better suited for this task, please do let me know.

Any help you can proivde is greatly appreciated!!!

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cgrenier
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Re: At a loss and overwhelmed....

#2 Post by cgrenier »

As new data have been written to the disk, your old videos may have been overwritten...
Do you see your videos when using testdisk, Advanced, undelete ?

TSaha125
Posts: 2
Joined: 25 Jan 2018, 18:29

Re: At a loss and overwhelmed....

#3 Post by TSaha125 »

Hi, I have not tried that - should I? Would it be better than PhotoRec? PhotoRec (when I use the wizard and choose video files and choose recycle bin for location) kicks out when it hits the 3rd of 5 drives. I only know my C: drive so not sure what drive it kicks out on ....something related to a smart drive (no idea how it got there or if it was there before). But if I manually search only C: drive without the wizard, it does not give an option to look only at recycle bin.

I can try testdesk if that is better.

Thanks,
Trina

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