Restore from your backup. If you don't have a backup (and now you know
why backing up is A Good Thing), then if you have Vista Business or
Ultimate you can use the Previous Versions feature to get the folder
back. Look in Vista's Help for "previous versions". If you only have
Home Basic/Premium, then stop using the computer immediately. The more
you use the machine, the less your chances of retrieving the data are.
Here are some data recovery programs that may work for you. Some are
free while most of the commercial ones will let you run a trial version
to see if they would recover data before purchase. f you use data
recovery software, install it on another machine and either use it from
that operating system or create a bootable cd/floppy and work with that.
If you don't have the skill and/or equipment to do these procedures and
the data is crucial, take the machine to a professional computer repair
shop that has experience in doing data recovery. This will not be your
local version of BigStoreUSA. In-shop data recovery is usually not
exactly cheap (for ex., my charges are generally $150-350USD), but it
normally costs less than sending the drive to a company like Drive
Savers. You need to make the determination of the value of your data and
decide what to do.
http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html
PCInspector File Recovery -
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/welcome.htm
Executive Software “Undelete” -
http://www.execsoft.com/undelete/undelete.asp
R-Studio -
http://www.r-tt.com/
File Scavenger -
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
Ontrack's EasyRecovery -
http://www.ontrack.com/software/
Malke