H fiolks

Ok, it's confession time.

I've got about 15GB worth of music on my Pc at home, it's taken me a good 6 months to get it all put on there.

I just did something so stupid, I can't even believe I've done it yet.

I was going through my music folders and deleting stuff that I didn't need any more. I thought I was within a particular folder nad deleting all tracks from that folder.

However, I was in the main folder with all music folders, so I did a select all and shift delete.

I automatically clicked yes, grrrrr

Now I have no music files at all...I want to cry.

Is there any way of recovering this stuff??? No it's not in the recycle bin.

I've tried to system restore, however it doesn't recover files and folder, on system setting.

By the way, I'm using windows XP.

Any help will be very very very warmly appreciated.

Darren

Hi Hugmaster, i have just spoken to a friend in my IT department at work he said to me as long as you have not formatted your hard drive you can recover all your lost data, the program you will need is media recover or anything similar, just do a search..
hope thats of some help..!

Darren,

Doesn't Windows XP automatically keep a back up partition on your HD which is a mirror image of your system days / hours ago ?. I remember this, since it was one feature (of many) which put me off using XP on my business PC, since I often keep customers personal data on there, and once deleted (Under data protection act) I want it to stay deleted!.

Failing that there are other file recovery applications out there. I believe that Norton Undelete is one of the more succesful ones.

If you go to downloads.com and do a search for file recovery, you may find something on a 30 day trial which will do the Job, but Norton Undelete seems to be the more reliable one.

Hugmaster, you should be able to find a program that'll do what you need on something like www.shareware.com or www.tucows.com. I had a problem when I'd put a whole load of very important data on a CDR which seemed to burn OK but the computer then refused to read it. I found a data recovery program for that problem so I think you'll be OK too.

Good Luck

Ian Stuart

Thanks folks, as ever you're a bunch of stars.

I'll let you know what happens.

Darren

It does appear Darren, that by deleting anything from Windows in the conventional way, unless you securely delete by overwriting it, all you do is remove the reference to it - the actual data still remains intact on the HD until a time when it is overwritten by other data.

So in other words, the files are still there and intact on your HD , all you need to do is to find the right software to bring them back to the location that they were originally in.

Howdy

Well just to give you an update on my mp3 files...

I managd to recover about two thirds of the information I lost, however, the file names were all jumbled up and only a couple of the folders were left intact.

I've decided that it would be quicker to spend a solid week ripping the tracks again rather than trying to reorganise it all and scratch my head wondering which files are actually missing.

Thanks for the suggestons folks and I dare say it'll come in andy if every I lose anythign else...hope it doesn't come to that though.

Darren