Lost home videos

[vonda]

I wanted to clear space on my iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz), attached an external hard drive and for days took all of my home videos and copied them over to the external drive. The external drive is a 3 TB which I partitioned and made 2 back ups on of my movies. When I was finished I selected the files on my iMac drive and moved them to the trash. Deleted them and found they had also been deleted (both backups) on the external drives? Since that time I have tried to use Stellar Phoenix to retrieve my lost/trashed files but to no avail.

Any advice?

Vonda

 

[arjen92]

He Vonda,

I always use Date Rescue II to retrieve files I deleted.

It depends though on how you deleted the files. Did you just empty your trash or did you erase it (with the hard drive utilities program).

Because when you did the last option you might (not likely) made it write zeros over the erased data. This means the data is really lost. Else it would be still there, but labeled as "free space". Software like Data Rescue II look at what's really on the hard drive and ignore these "labels".

 

[mstrze]

I have nothing to add to help you currently but I was curious as to why you thought having a backup on the same hard drive made sense? Buying 2 1.5TB drives would serve you better.

This is certainly odd. It sounds like you didn't actually copy the files per se, but essentially made shortcuts to the original files? Although since you said this took days, it must have copied something?

You should have just dragged the files to their new location on the external drive. Is this what you did? I think maybe holding down option while you dragged them would have performed a move, rather than a copy and would have saved you the deletion step.

 

[vonda]

Thank you both for your responses, I am still trying to locate my lost files with Data Rescue.

I do have two externals hooked up, one is my Time Machine Backup, and I also dragged the files over to copy.. but moving them probably would have been the better option since I have lost them

I appreciate your feedback.