cd copying disaster

G

Guest

Hi There,I wonder if you can help me?
I took a load of pictures of my nipper's school sports day on my digital
camera and decided to burn them direct from the camera to a CD so she could
subsequently show them to her friends on this and her friends computers. I
duly plugged in the camera (which showed up as an external drive) and
dragged and dropped the files to the CD drive icon using windows explorerer
(I use Windows XP - Home Edition). The files were duly transfered to the CD
in 'shadow format' and i clicked on the "write these files to CD" icon. All
went well and as usual, i noticed that at the end of the burning process when
prompted to press the 'finish' button on the Wizard all the shadow files
automatically disappeared! (A friend has told me that they are automatically
deleted by the Wizard and do not go via the Recycle Bin - Is that correct?)
Well the CD was a peach and i therefore deleted all the files from the
camera. NEXT?.... Yes you guessed it, about a month later she lost the CD on
the way to school!! So i have tried to find the files that were created on
the computer during the burning process because the original camera files
have gone (i use it extensively and on a daily basis for work) and I have
discovered that they were temorarily stored in a hidden file called "CD
burning". This folder is however empty. During the interim period I have
burned 3 or 4 further CDs with loads of data for my wife's MSc studies using
the same technique and the computer has been re-booted every day since the
original sports day copying. Someone told me that once the files were
automatically deleted at the end of the burning process that the area they
had occupied was subsequently made available for new files and that because
of the volume of work then undertaken the likelyhood is that they have all
been overwritten and are therefore gone forever!!... What do you think?
Additionally as part of my routine system Maintainance i have de-fragged,
Optimized and deleted temporary files at least 3 times since the initial copy.
My question is this?.... Do i have a hope in hell of
retrieving/rescueing/restoring these pictures? I would be prepared to pay for
a specialist company to do some sort of professional retrieval if its
possible as my daughter is now very sad. Or do i wait till next years sports
Day and save a copy just in case......
Thank you for your time
regards Howard
 
M

Matt Buxton

I`d say that they were all gone, i`m afraid. You could go out and buy
something like Norton systemworks (never thought i`d hear myself
reccomending anything by Norton/Symantec ever again) which includes undelete
tools, but its more likely than not that the files are gone.

Let that be a lesson to you, anything valuable back it up.
 
G

Guest

Matt Buxton said:
I`d say that they were all gone, i`m afraid. You could go out and buy
something like Norton systemworks (never thought i`d hear myself
reccomending anything by Norton/Symantec ever again) which includes undelete
tools, but its more likely than not that the files are gone.

Let that be a lesson to you, anything valuable back it up.

I think that you have to have undelete already installed at the time of
deletion for it to work.
 

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