Have you ever lost your precious photos because of a hard drive failure? Or have you ever deleted them by mistake without making a copy beforehand? I bet you have. Losing photos is never a pleasant experience, and losing those of a unique event like wedding is a real nightmare for many of us. That being said, there is still a chance to get your digital memories back, in particular, when you take appropriate measures as soon as possible. So, let’s discover what you can do to recover photos that were lost or deleted from a USB flash drive, a memory card, an SSD or an HDD.
First of all, once you discover that some photos are missing, please:
- immediately stop using the device they disappeared or were deleted from to prevent them from being overwritten with other information. Remember that it is impossible to restore overwritten files;
- do not try repairing your data storage device yourself (unless you are an electronics repair specialist), if it is physically damaged, but hurry to the nearest data recovery center;
- avoid fixing logical errors detected by the OS (reject the corresponding prompts) as this may aggravate your data loss case.
Additionally, please mind that data recovery software like Raise Data Recovery, Recovery Explorer or any other program you may find in the Internet can restore missing photos only in case of logical data loss, i.e. occurred because of accidental or intentional deletion, quick format, file system corruption, malware/virus infection or software/hardware malfunction.
Below you can find step-by-step instructions on how to get back your deleted or lost photos with the help of Raise Data Recovery and Recovery Explorer Standard programs.
The first step is the same for both programs and consists in downloading and installing any of them on the computer you’re planning to use for data recovery purposes. You can download Raise Data Recovery or Recovery Explorer Standard from the official websites of these programs and install any just like you usually install applications on your PC.
Then, if you're dealing with an external data storage medium (USB flash memory, memory card, portable SSD/HDD), attach it to the computer and run the program. And if you’ve lost or accidentally deleted photos from an internal drive of the PC, skip this step and just launch the data recovery program right after its installation.
How to undelete photos with Raise Data Recovery
Check the Physical disks or Logical volumes pane of the main window for your storage device or a corresponding partition on it.
Double-click this storage/partition or select it and then hit Continue in the bottom right corner to start its scanning for missing photos.
On the next step, you’ll see two scanning options: Use deep scan (recommendable after quick-formatting your data storage) and This file system only (adequate for the majority of data loss scenarios). Select the necessary one.
Wait till the scanning is over. You can control its progress with the help of the respective bar.
To make finding a particular lost file easier and quicker, Raise Data Recovery automatically groups all files into different folders by their types. So that you can immediately access all photos, both the currently available and the undeleted/restored ones, recollected in the Photos and pictures folder.
Additionally, you can preview files the way they are grouped on your storage, and for this, just open the All files folder.
In case you can’t find your missing photos in none of the mentioned above folders, please also look through the contents of the Extra found, $LostFiles and $Recycle.Bin folders.
The program is also equipped with an integrated file previewer and a search function.
Tick off all photos you need to save and hit the Recover selected button.
Choose a target storage for your recovered photos, press Start recovery, and they will be copied to the specified location. Please NEVER save the recovered data to the storage they've been restored from. This will put them under risk and can even cause irreversible data loss.
How to undelete photos with Recovery Explorer Standard
Find the data storage you’ve lost or deleted photos from among the Logical disks/Connected storages.
To start its scanning for missing files, select it and press Start scan or, as an alternative, select it and click on the Scan this storage instrument in the toolbar at the top of the list of storages.
Now make several settings. In case you’re not sure about any of them, just keep the parameters set by default. Press the Next button to proceed.
After that hit Start scan to start searching for lost photos.
Once the scanning is finished, Recovery Explorer Standard will show you a popup prompting you to save the scan result database. You can save it and upload it to the program to avoid re-scanning that very storage in future or skip this step. But please do not save the result to the storage you’ve just scanned.
Now find the recovered files you’d like to save. Click on the D*efine selection* tool in the top toolbar and tick them off. You can also hold the Ctrl key and click on the necessary files one by one.
Then click the Save (recover) selection tool and choose a storage you’d like to copy the restored files to. It must not be the storage you are restoring your photos from in order to avoid their permanent loss. Press Select, and your photos will be copied to the chosen storage.
Top comments (0)