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Entire Folder Missing - External Drive (Windows 10) Heeelp!

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WallflowerAsparagus
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05 Mar 2021, 12:52 am

Oh, my. Anxiety.

Hello...

I'm wondering if anyone can help me as I cannot find anything online to assist.
I noticed a folder full of .NEF files, .PSD files and a few .PNG files had gone missing this week.
I'm a photographer and these images cannot be reshot, the locations either no longer exist or are in the process of being destroyed. I shot these in August last year. I am running Windows 10.

- I do not remember deleting this folder (It's a HUGE folder) off my external hard drive. It is not on my backup external hard drive either, yet folders from later dates are intact on both.

- I have used Disk Drill to attempt to recover it if it has been deleted - It did not show a single image from that folder or that day or any .PSD folders I created from the .NEF images over the upcoming months.

- I used RescuePRO Deluxe on all my SD cards, it even recovered images from half a decade ago... but nothing from that day in August 2020.

- I have done an extensive search in Windows on all my drives for keywords of folders and names of images from that day which came up with nothing.

- I scanned the drives with anti-virus software, unlikely that one folder would be affected, but I persisted...and came up with nothing.

I'm speculating if they had been deleted or if they are unable to be seen.

It is almost as if the images never existed! :?

I spent all day taking thousands of images that day, I was deeply hyper focused within my creative zone that day and shot some images that I was very proud of. I had been working on them since December or January. I was very unwell from October - December and I couldn't move around much, but edited a lot of these images in that time... All that work gone. :(

I am very sad about this and it's causing me a great deal of anxiety.
I have spent the last two days doing nothing but attempting to find these files. :cry:

Can anybody please, please provide any insight to what is going on and how to retrieve my folder?

Many thanks. :heart:


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Mikah
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05 Mar 2021, 3:06 am

WallflowerAsparagus wrote:
It is almost as if the images never existed! :?


Given you've already tried forensic recovery, this seems like the most likely answer - not that you didn't take the pictures, but they seem never to have been copied to the drive in the first place, nor to your backup medium. The very unlikely alternatives I can think of:

- The hard drive and your backup drive are both reporting a fake capacity or otherwise failed at the same time.
- Someone has not just deleted but overwritten this one folder and its backup just to annoy you.

It's probably best to assume it was human forgetfulness for now and to keep looking, they may yet turn up.

WallflowerAsparagus wrote:
I was very unwell from October - December and I couldn't move around much, but edited a lot of these images in that time... All that work gone.


Hmmm. Just in case... maybe get/check a carbon monoxide detector, your memory might have been messed with by a faulty boiler.


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WallflowerAsparagus
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05 Mar 2021, 4:54 am

Mikah wrote:
WallflowerAsparagus wrote:
It is almost as if the images never existed! :?


Given you've already tried forensic recovery, this seems like the most likely answer - not that you didn't take the pictures, but they seem never to have been copied to the drive in the first place, nor to your backup medium. The very unlikely alternatives I can think of:

- The hard drive and your backup drive are both reporting a fake capacity or otherwise failed at the same time.
- Someone has not just deleted but overwritten this one folder and its backup just to annoy you.

It's probably best to assume it was human forgetfulness for now and to keep looking, they may yet turn up.

WallflowerAsparagus wrote:
I was very unwell from October - December and I couldn't move around much, but edited a lot of these images in that time... All that work gone.


Hmmm. Just in case... maybe get/check a carbon monoxide detector, your memory might have been messed with by a faulty boiler.


- I was unwell with pneumonia and after I recovered I had edited the images as well.
- I searched every drive and I can see hidden folders.
- I also checked every SD card I own and recovered images from those. It even recovered images from half a decade ago, but not any of the images in the folder I am searching for.

Nobody has access to any of these drives or my PC except for me. I live alone. Nobody so much as owns a spare key to my house.

This situation is extremely stressful.


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maycontainthunder
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05 Mar 2021, 5:16 am

It is really easy to accidentally move a folder into another. Have a manual hunt through other folders on the drive, maybe you'll be lucky.



Mikah
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05 Mar 2021, 7:41 am

maycontainthunder wrote:
It is really easy to accidentally move a folder into another. Have a manual hunt through other folders on the drive, maybe you'll be lucky.


This may be possible. It depends on the recovery tools used. The ones I've used in the past have always ignored the filesystem and searched the whole drive, not just the free space. You'd think if the files had only been moved, the recovery tools would have picked them up.


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Eurythmic
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08 Mar 2021, 8:33 pm

It's a long shot but there's a couple of things you could try WallflowerAsparagus:

Open up explorer and point it at the location of your external drive. Go to the search bar and enter "kind:=picture"

You could also try taking one of the two drives (leaving the other one securely at home) to a friend's computer and manually searching the hard drive with their machine.

It's certainly weird that both the main and backup external drives don't show the files and very very unlikely that both drives have failed in only the sectors where the folder from that particular day is. That's why I'm wondering if there's some issue with your local computer.

Since it's a huge folder that's missing, is there concordance between the total contents you can see on the drive and the drive's reported used space?



WallflowerAsparagus
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08 Mar 2021, 8:43 pm

maycontainthunder wrote:
It is really easy to accidentally move a folder into another. Have a manual hunt through other folders on the drive, maybe you'll be lucky.


Oh, I've been hunting. Losing hope on the matter. It's just upsetting because I was able to do more photographic work that day than I did in the whole year. I revisited one building to photograph (I photograph abandoned buildings) and every room in the place had changed, some drastically. I realised the images were missing when I wanted to compare the changes.

That lost folder was more art therapy for me.


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WallflowerAsparagus
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08 Mar 2021, 8:47 pm

Eurythmic wrote:
It's a long shot but there's a couple of things you could try WallflowerAsparagus:

Open up explorer and point it at the location of your external drive. Go to the search bar and enter "kind:=picture"

You could also try taking one of the two drives (leaving the other one securely at home) to a friend's computer and manually searching the hard drive with their machine.

It's certainly weird that both the main and backup external drives don't show the files and very very unlikely that both drives have failed in only the sectors where the folder from that particular day is. That's why I'm wondering if there's some issue with your local computer.

Since it's a huge folder that's missing, is there concordance between the total contents you can see on the drive and the drive's reported used space?


I have checked the total contents vs the used space and on my PC it is accurate, although I am unsure how much space was available when I was accessing the folder.

I too am wondering if it's an issue with my PC.

I have done a search like that and even specified the date taken.

Checking it with another person's PC might be a good idea, just to completely rule out the issue being with the PC. I will do that.

Thank you all for your help.


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cberg
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08 Mar 2021, 9:10 pm

I swear by a program called PhotoRec, here's a link:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec


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