Photos vanish from friends computer

[AlanHo]

A friend asked me for help today - he has a Dell desktop running Vista Home basic and has found that all his photos have disappeared. He knows little about computers and could not identify what he or his family might have done to destroy all their valauble photos.

For sure, no-one admits to deleting them - they have just vanished and are not in the recycle bin.

The "Pictures" folder still shows in Windows Explorer - but the folder is empty, whereas a few days ago it contained several dozen sub folders and several hundreds of photos. Needless to say - he has no back-up and only a few of the pictures are stored elsewhere - either in his camera, on his iPod or on slide show CD's.

I examined the computer using Windows Explorer and confirmd that the Pictures folder was indeed showing empty. I set Windows to display hidden files and browsed through all his folders and could find no trace of his photos. He told me that he used AVG Anti Virus but I noticed that there was no icon for AVG in his task bar notification area. Upon checking I found that AVG, although installed, was not loading. I manually loaded AVG, did a full scan and found 411 items of malware of which 19 were in the registry and 74 were trojans. The rest were tracking cookies. These were all deleted. No-one can recall doing anything to switch AVG off.

I then loaded Recuva and did a scan for photos that could be recovered - it found 13,040 but most were in the temporary internet folders and revealed the sort of browsing being indulged in by his teenage son and daughter who also use the computer and who have their own accounts. He was very embarrassed because he thought the parental controls setting had prevented access to such graphic porn sites. However - none of the files were photos from the "pictures" folder so the task was abandoned.

I then used Superantispyware to do a full scan - it found a further 72 items of malware which I deleted but the pictures folder remains empty.

Is there anything else I could try............................................?????

PS: I have already lectured him on the need to back up valuable data and what he can do in this regard - so advice in this respect is not needed. What I am seeking is a magic wand to find his photos.

[Alan2273]

Give this a try Alan.

When it loads go to advanced, file type and untick everything but jpeg, this will make the scan faster.

http://www.pctools.com/file-recover/?ref=g...CFVkA4wodMX-bPA

[Dencandy]

I assume you've already tried the obvious one of using Windows Search to look for all pictures, music & videos (hidden folders included)?

[AlanHo]

I assume you've already tried the obvious one of using Windows Search to look for all pictures, music & videos (hidden folders included)?

Yes, I set hidden files to be shown - Windows search found none of the pictures that are missing. My friend knew some of the exact file names, so I was able to search for them - but with no result.

A search for *.jpg did find lots of files - but they were image files in folders other than the pictures folder and not those that were lost.

alan2273.....

My friend lives a few miles away so I just gave your suggested PC Tools recovery programme a go on my computer. It installed OK but will not run. My computer lacks an A: drive (floppy) and the program insists on me putting a disk into the missing drive before it will continue. In any event the free version makes clear it will not recover files - presumably only find them?.

I am however - fairly happy that Recuva did its stuff - when I used Recuva on my friend's computer I did both a quick scan - which found roughly 12,800 deleted image files and a deep scan which found 13,040.