Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

Friday morning I had a folder on one of my drives partitions; Monday morning, the entire folder is missing. I've searched all the drives for some of the things in the folder in case it somehow got moved, but searches turned up nothing. All I can think is that somehow it got deleted. As far as I can tell, it's the only thing missing, and there are other folders on that same partition that are still there and open normally. I even used Safe Mode and looked in other users files to see if it got moved into one of them, but again, no luck.

There is a program called Search & Recover that sells for around $40. I'm wondering if I need a program like this or if there's another way to recover this missing folder? Does anyone know if this program actually works, or of another one that will?

Thanks for any help!

BTW, I don't think it matters, but I finally got rid of a nasty trojan Friday evening; is there any possibility at all that could have anything to do with the missing folder?

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

That could have something to do with it, for sure. More specifically, whatever tool you used to remove the Trojan may have also removed the folder.

If you want to recover the missing files, the more you use that PC the less chance you will have of success ;)

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

If you are sure it was deleted, yes, you can recover it. Even if it was deleted by a trojan, there is still a chance of recovery. Files are not completely deleted until they are written over, and even then, if you try hard enough, you can restore the deleted object. I suggest this program to restore it: Restorer. When looking at the file names, remember that some files are renamed when deleted/moved to the recycle bin (Dc*.filetype, etc...).

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

Thanks Senter, I used the Restoration program and it looks like I'll be able to get back just about everything. A couple of things have been corrupted -- probably from using that drive a bit.

The only thing I don't like is that I can only recover one file at a time, is there a way to select multiple files for recovery? The one-at-a-time is working, but very tedious and time consuming as I had literally hundreds of files there. This was my backup drive, luckily only one folder was deleted. Guess I'd better start backing up on two drives or burning a lot of CD's.

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

I don't know anyway to select multiple files with any freeware products that restore. Sorry.

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

In the readme file ,that comes with the download ,there is a email address for tech support ,ash the builder if there is a way to select all or more of the file ,maybe even ash them to update it to do so !

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

Undelete has an Emergency Undelete feature which can recover deleted files. It runs from the CD-ROM, so you don't run the risk of overwriting the deleted files when you install the undeleting program.

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

Good idea, I'll do that.

I said before that I had several hundred files, well actually there are nearly 25,000 according to Restorer. About 20% of these are NPROTECT. If that's the case, shouldn't I have been able to restore these with Norton somehow?

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

25.000,what the heck did you delete !!

Re: Can I recover deleted items after recycle bin has been emptied?
 

"I" didn't delete it, it was either another user (though I doubt it), the trojan itself, or the process of removing the trojan; I don't think these last two are very likely either, but something/someone did in fact delete it.

Like I mentioned before, this is my backup drive. I had most of the things I wanted to keep in this folder: pictures, emails, documents, presentations, etc.

The good news is, I can get the majority of it back; it will just take some time restoring them one-by-one.