Howiethetaff
May 02, 2005, 04:37 AM
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
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