It all started when I downloaded the new version of Picasa. I got a message pop up in Picasa up saying one of my hard drives didn't have enough space on it.. funny I thought, so I had a look in my computer, and noticed that my C drive only had 500 MB left on it, strange as I had over 2 gigs free on it earlier. Nothing is ever installed onto C, it is kept purely for Windows. I delved a bit deeper into it and found out that the Picasa database lives on the C drive, and mine was over 2 gigs in size, I thought no problem, I'll just move the database to another drive but apparently Picasa doesn't have an option to put the data base anywhere other than the C Drive.
I decided rather than fiddling too much, I would repartition the drive I moved 5 gig over to C from another drive, and had no problem at all. Then I noticed that on my second hard drive, one of the partitions with all my avi files was running short of space, so I decided to give it some more space too. It seemed to be taking a long time so I left it going and went to bed. I started the PC the next day, went to my computer and my drive with all the videos had disappeared. Disk management, showed the partition but had no drive letter assigned to it, I gave it a drive letter, then... I noticed all 70gig on that partition was free, all my video files on it had gone......
Oh dear, I hadn't backed it up since July.. I bet you can guess I was not happy...I remembered a program that I had used years ago, to recover lost data, I found a newer version of it, and let it scan the drive, it was taking hours, so I went to bed and left it running. When I got up this morning, I opened up the program and it had found all the deleted data on the drive, even things that I had deleted years ago. I restored the videos I hadn't backed up, and I was a happy bunny again.
I have always backed up files, in fact I have backups of backups, but I got lazy,....and left it too long...I've promised myself that I will back up more regularly, and definitely backup before I re-size any more partitions.... I was lucky it wasn't my windows drive that got wiped.
For anyone that interest in the program it's freeware and it works.. I've added a link in Nothing To Do With Crafting.. the program is PC Inspector File Recovery, they also have a program Smart Recovery that they say will recover deleted data from camera cards, have a look on their site for it.
