I back up my Documents to external hard drives. Today I was doing that when, early during the process, I accidentally erased that Folder on the computer before it was copied. I meant to close a desktop but I actually completely deleted the original Documents folder. It was completely deleted; it is not in the Trash bin.
The folder is about 90 GB in size.
I am praying that there is a way to recover this folder. This folder contains information that I positively need and some of it goes back many years.
PLEASE - if anyone here knows how I can recover this Folder, PLEASE tell me. And PLEASE tell me in a way that someone like me (a fairly unsophisticated computer user) can understand it. As soon as I realized what I had done, I stopped everything and I have done nothing further on the computer other than coming here.
PLEASE tell me there is a solution. I am truly desperate.
You can try using testdisk to recover the data. I would boot off a live ISO to avoid writing to the disk as much as possible until you can recover the data.
I just downloaded Testdisk and I extracted it but I don’t see a way to burn it to a CD or DVD disc so that I can use it as you suggest. What do I do now?
testdisk is on the EOS live iso, just use the latest live ISO.
The only problem is you probably don’t want to install it on the actual system because you want to minimize the chance of writing over any of those blocks.
Do I have to reboot the computer engaging the live ISO? And, if so, then what do I do (in other words, how do I recover the folder)? The Documents folder is not encrypted.
Thank you for your help so far. I am absolutely sick because of what I have done.
If you are still using that computer, I would reboot off the ISO as soon as possible. You really don’t want to do anything else that would write to the disk.
ALL of my financial data (income tax forms, account numbers, passwords, etc.) plus other important data including passwords for all of my accounts, and more things that I take for granted but I can’t think of right now. It totals about 90 GB so you can just imagine how many documents and information I have within that folder.
@dalto
I didn’t realize testdisk was on the live ISO. I have used it also once before to recover files that were overwritten by a child plugging a usb stick into an xbox and it messed up the partitions. I was able to recover the persons files. 10 years worth of them. It was a teacher and the problem i ran into was ALL of the files for lessons were damaged and became corrupted so i was able to get everything but most of the lesson plans that were written to work on a smartboard were the ones that were mostly damaged and although recovered were not 100% It has it’s own file format and it’s very flaky! So if they could be opened at least they could be partially used or rebuilt so it was a lot of help.
I tried it and then rebooted. I must have done something wrong because the folder was not restored. I’ll try again. I have to tell you that I am sick to my stomach. I’ll carefully reread the tutorial and try again. By the way, my computer is UEFI with Secure Boot turned off. The testdisk program saw that I had UEFI. Does that make any difference?
I think I’m doing everything correctly (on my fourth try) but the program is showing Copying, please wait and then many files that are being copied but then the line turns from green to red and it shows that while some are ok, others show failed.
This happened on my third try and I stopped the whole thing. I then rebooted back onto my computer (not the live ISO) but no Documents folder was present.
As I’m writing this I’m trying again but I’m still seeing many files failed. (Just now 58494 and no more are being copied but the failed list is still growing.)
What now? If this doesn’t work, is there anything else I can try? I repeat that I’m desperate.