Data recovery software?

[Newby]

I've got a friend that had malware delete his pictures folder. Or something to that extent. Something to the tune of six years worth of pictures gone. His fault for not backing them up, but whatever, no use crying over spilled milk.

I used to know of software that would look for "deleted" files and recover them, but that was before I even started high school. Does anybody know of anything that'll work nowadays? I'm guessing that the data is still on the hard drive, there's just nothing pointing at it.

I seriously doubt the data is completely gone if it's six years worth of photos, so any caliber of software would be good. And whether or not it's open source won't be an issue... if it comes down to it, I'll just steal it. But I'd prefer open source/freeware, as rare of a chance as that would be!

Thanks in advance! Any positive solutions welcome.

[iago]

First of all, tell him not to touch the computer.. if possible, turn it off (by pulling the plug) and slave the disk to another system to do this.

Second, the best free tool I was able to find (albeit from a very quick search)  was WinUndelete. It is free and fast and finds a *ton* of stuff.

Hope that helps!

[Newby]

First of all, tell him not to touch the computer.. if possible, turn it off (by pulling the plug) and slave the disk to another system to do this.

Did that. He kinda just shrugged that off, so a good chunk of the pictures might be gone from being overwritten, but whatever, anything beats nothing at this point.

Second, the best free tool I was able to find (albeit from a very quick search)  was WinUndelete. It is free and fast and finds a *ton* of stuff.

Awesome! I'll look into it!

[Newby]

Gonna throw this out there: WinUnDelete is not free! If it recovers stuff, it recovers it to an image file that the full version can unlock. That's practically ransom.

[Blaze]

Sounds like a great time to practice your cracking skills!

[Joe]

Try Microsoft Undelete.

(lol dos6.)

[Newby]

Sounds like a great time to practice your cracking skills!

It'll kill time, since I have to wait for the laundry machines to stop being in use so I can do laundry so I can have clothes that aren't dirty.

[iago]

Heh, that's retarded. I didn't test to the point where I actually opened the file, guess I should have.

[Blaze]

Heh, that's retarded. I didn't test to the point where I actually opened the file, guess I should have.

Oh, and it'd be super evil if it made an image out of the files, then wrote over them a whole bunch of times so it had the only copy!  Heh heh heh...