I decided to do a factory reset on my PC today after having put it off for a while. Ever since I upgraded it, I felt I wasn’t getting everything it could offer and that a factory reset was in order. Over the years, I had accumulated all of our family photos and videos in a folder on this PC. All said, it was roughly 1,000 photos from as early as I was 5 years old. I had backed up the photos in case of an event, twice. Once on my phone and another on a flash drive. Problem is my phone was running out of space so I decided to delete the photos to make space thinking I had two more instances on my PC and flash drive. About a month or so ago I erased the backup on the flash drive as well to make space for a Linux installer as I wanted to mess around with old laptops I had lying around. But I had completely forgotten to add the photos back to the flash drive when I was done. Fast foward to today, I impulsively decided to go forward with the factory reset on my PC. Before doing so, I backed up passwords and the like to a second SSD, and I was sure I had backed up the photos as well. I copied over the photos a second time, but then thought that I had copied the folder within another folder, and backed them up a second time unnecessarily, so I deleted it from the backup folder on the backup SSD. I don’t know why, it’s not like the SSD was small, and I didn’t think that about the fact that I had no other backups. Needless to say, I went forward with the factory reset, and only after I realized that I had deleted the only backups I had off of the backup SSD before the reset. I have spent hours pouring over old phones, cloud storages, and drives desperately trying to find at least some photos but to no avail as I have reformatted/wiped most of them already with the intention of selling or scrapping them eventually. I am frustrated to the point of tears at my own stupidity. I can’t even eat. The ones that hurt the most are photos of my late best friend.
tl:dr – Due to my arrogance and impulsiveness, I accidentally deleted the only copies of family photos I had for over the past 20 years.
UPDATE EDIT:
Thanks to the incredible help from the commentors, I have successfully recovered most of my photos using PhotoRec!
Thank you all so very much for your kind and sincere concern and help! I cherish and love all of you. You all have no idea how much this means to me, truly!
Comments
You can try to recover the files on the backup SSD. Deletion does not delete the files until you overwrite them or run a trim command.
i just want to say i’m really sorry. hopefully one of the recovery methods works for you.
All may not be lost, depending on what OS and filesystem you were using, whether it was encrypted, and exactly what constituted a “factory reset”.
I found myself in a similar situation many years ago, and recovered almost everything using third-party file recovery software. It wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it at the time.
Most important at this point is to stop using the PC, until you can assess your options.
The data on the flashdrive and/or the PC hard drive should be recoverable by EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard or some other like product.
You might lose some files, being overwritten, but likely you’ll get 99% of your stuff back.
It’s a bit of a chore to set up and use, but I have every photo I’ve ever taken since 2001 on Amazon glacier storage. It costs around $0.75 a month I think. Also have 100s of GBs of documents and other random stuff on there. It’s super slow to store and retrieve, but it’s practically free.
Oh, friend. I feel for you, truly. I was young and impatient and impulsive once, too. It’s these things that teach us.
Assuming you haven’t been using the computer, you should be able to recover the files.
If you want the absolute best chance of recovering your files, send the drive off to a data recovery service. There is software you can buy to try and recover, but you could do more harm than good. Simply using the computer and downloading things will reduce the amount of files you can recover.
As others have said: stop using that SSD. If you really copied the photos then deleted them on the backup SSD, they can be recovered using a free Windows/Linux software called Photorec: https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download .
If the only place where you had your files was on your Windows SSD, I suggest you remove it and plug it in another PC using a HDD dock (30-40 bucks) and then use Photorec. There are plenty of guides for that software on the net.
Recuva
Unless you formatted the drive as part of the factory reset, that data’s still stored on the hard drive. There are plenty of options for data recovery software out there for that exact situation.
Just try to avoid using the computer until you’ve made a recovery effort, as any new data could potentially overwrite the images still on the drive.
Time to pay someone
They are still there, so you just need a program to retrieve them. They are free floating in “unallocated space” and a computer tech can retrieve them. I wouldn’t try to do it myself for fear or making things worse. Hire somebody.
Law enforcement employs these kind of tech guys to recover deleted evidence (like photos) from computers in a variety of cases — like child porn. It can definitely be done.
It engineer here. As many have said, please stop using the drive. In my experience, for your peace of mind get a professional to sort this out.
Please dont be offended, but reading your post, it is apparent you will struggle to recover data yourself.
Look around locally and see what is available. You would be surprised that it can be sorted and you can recover almost everything.
If you’re dead set on recovering it yourself, I suggest you check out disk drill or recuva. Just know these are designed for ease of use and not what IT recovery professionals will use. Hence, results may vary.
DROP. BOX. Sorry you lost them :/
Buy some recovery software, RTFM, then you might get some of them back.
Computer forensics guy here.
Any advice you get that isn’t *power off all these devices and seek help* is going to result in data-loss. I don’t mean shutdown, I mean power off.
If the OS is running, you’re losing data.
If you’re trying to carve files from slack space, you’re losing data.
The devices you have need to be put on a write-blocker, imaged, and carved.
You stand a fairly decent chance of getting much of it back, **as long as** you don’t do anything with those storage devices other than put them on a write-blocker.
If you’re anywhere near Charlotte NC, I’ll do it for you.
There are companies that specialize in data recovery (for just this sort of situation) out there.
Results aren’t guaranteed… they have no way of knowing until they get in there…and they are pricey. But it could be an option.
you can get forensic data recovery done (at a cost). I found this out when my moron ex let a drive overheat (i had warned him to switch it off as they were notorious for overheating, and i also told him to back it up) and burn out with the only copies of all our baby photos on. Unfortunately due to the damage to the disk ours weren’t recoverable, but you still have your disk intact.
We as a family print out several yrs to get and make our photo albums. As silly as anything that we saved or not, it gets printed out. It cost a pretty penny but in the end it’s worth having our memories saved on paper. It did cost last time about two to three hundred dollars but totally worth it in the end.