A dear friend of mine lost an entire directory containing years of pictures. It was called "Archive" an located under the classic "My Documents" folder. He just found it empty, one day, and inside it it found some iTunes related file.

Of course, he had no backup (!).

I helped him recover 40% of his pictures using Recuva.
More files were actually recovered, name and size being apparently correct, but, they are unreadable because they were overwritten to various degrees. You can find one example attached.

So, my question is: what software, if there's any, would you recommend to try to recover the broken files? They're all JPG, and hopefully this could help some recovery software to make at least some sense out of the messed up bits?

He's not still using the computer, is he? Even if there's something that can do this, and I'm not aware of anything, he really has to stop using it to prevent any more overwriting.

This might help, but I'm not sure if it does anything that Recuva can't.

Ideally, you wouldn't even have installed Recuva on his computer, but to another computer and then attached the drive from his PC.


*edit* Sorry to hear about your friend's data loss. It's a terrible feeling to have. That's why getting my clients' files backed up is one of the best feelings I have in my work. It gives ME peace of mind, because as much as I'd like to charge them for data recovery, I'd much rather they not lose irreplaceable files like these.

At this moment I'm running GetDataBack on a partially-fried hard disk that was sitting in an external casing. I don't know what happened to it, but it's pretty messed up, and GDB is taking about 7 hours to look over the disk. I'll be setting this customer up with a backup solution as soon as I can.

Thanks for the link, Matt.

I did not provide all info in my previous post, for simplicity.
In fact, my friend has been using his PC for months before he realized his archive directory was gone. Most of the recovery I succeeded in doing is actually from a backup disk, which gets rarely used, and which had been synched with his PC so that even that lost the Archive directory. So, it is not true that he had no backup. He actually had an incomplete backup strategy.

In any case, he is positive neither he nor his wife deleted the 500GB "Archive" directory. Such a big directory, moreover, would not fit in his Trashcan, so there would be way too many confirmations he would have to mistakenly OK, I think.
And, time to delete such a dir would also be quite alarming for him; he is actually experienced enough and computer savvy enough not to do anything so naive. He is an architect and works on his PC all day long, being usually very careful with backups. For his job stuff, of course. Not careful enough for his personal stuff.

I still can't understand what happened in the first place, anyway.

What was his process for moving data to this "backup" directory? Could it have been an error somewhere there? I'm still not sure what his thought process was with this backup strategy.

I'm currently using GetDataBack with great success, but this is on a drive that was never used after the data loss was discovered, which makes things much less bleak.

As you know I am not an Apple fan, and my dislike of iTunes borders on the fanatical, so I am not unbiased here... but is it possible that iTunes somehow was the culprit? I still vividly remember when QuickTime ate my RAID, and years later am still pissed off about it.

tanstaafl.

The sample you posted is nothing but gobbledygook. Though it does contain JPG byte patterns, it's incredibly corrupted. There aren't even start and end markers in the file. I suspect it's bits and pieces of many JPG files. Unfortunately, JPG is a file format that, without all the pieces in the right places, getting an image out is pretty much impossible.

In short, he used robocopy (mirroring mode) in a script I had once made for him. Unfortunately, he got lazy in creating the off-line backup sets according to the backup strategy I had prepared for him.
The thing is, robocopy script is just one click away. Off line backup meant swapping hdds in HDD trays.
The sad thing is, he knew exactly the risk of not creating off-line backups. Yet, he said he would never imagine a 500GB dir to "disappear"like that.

Doug, I myself don't know if it is at all possible. I am thinking - and maybe the apple experts in here know more than me - that iTunes incorporated the "My Documents/Archive" directory in those managed by it, and asked some questions like "do you want to add this humongous 500GB dir to your Colletion?"; could my friend have misinterpreted the question, clicked some yes/no, and killed the dir? It seems to me a bit too bad, even for iTunes.

I am suspicious that my friend may have run the backup script few times before realizing "Archive" was gone. So maybe the attached file is actually the product of several overwrites...

Unfortunately this is where most backup systems fall down since people don't see any immediate need for it, they think it's OK to not do it every now and then. Eventually it stops completely.

It needs to be as automated as possible (cron jobs or scheduled tasks).

Precisely. This is why I set up my non-techie clients with services like Crashplan. They do the backup consistently and automatically. Taym, I'd recommend setting your friend up (no matter how tech-friendly he may be) with the service. He doesn't have to pay to backup to Crashplan's servers, but the application will work with local storage for free or to a friend's computer that's also running the software.

It also keeps file changes and deleted files. So, if something like this happens again, he should be able to get the previous files back. I've never liked the idea of a simple mirror copy for backup purposes...

... yes, and of course he is looking at off-line backup NOW. . As I said before, he has been actually performing off-line backups quite regularly for his WORK stuff. Crazy, eh?

ok,my friend, on his notebook (so, different PC) found out that a directory he had under my documents, containing MP3s, called "Music - Temporary", is also empty, and it also contains a iTune-related file (more on that. I am waiting to see this file). No harm done, this time, since those MP3s were, as the directory name suggests, just temporary copies from his main collection.

So, what is going on? Has anybody experienced something similar? I can't find any reference to similar problems, on the internet...

Clearly an unusual, nearly unique experience. After all, that Gogle search only came up with nineteen and a half million hits.

I am so glad that Tony Fabris steered me to Copy Trans Manager so that my computer remains iTunes-free.

tanstaafl.

I can't find any reference to this particular case type, among the zillion ways iTune messes it all up. I read of files being moved to some other dir, re-encoded, re-sized (imgs), removed from collection but not from disk, removed form iPod/Phone after sync, removed from both HDD and mobole device after sync, or to collections partially deleted due to some user's mistake / GUI poor design.

The weird thing is that my friend is positive he has not been synching his iPod from work PCs since before this supposedly happened. So, while I tend more and more to believe that iTune is responsible, it really seems something unusual happened even for iTunes.

Also, to add more info, in both the empty directories my friend found not a "file" as he originally mentioned, but a directory tree replicating the iTune collection structure, it seems.

This is horrble software design, beyond compare.

I wish I had something helpful to add, but my experience with iTunes on Windows is extremely limited. It's base defaults on Windows are different then iTunes on Mac, and it's a foreign program in a Microsoft world. Apple did bring it to Windows by porting a lot of Mac frameworks over, who knows how solid the foundation is.

And, by the way, my friend is now geting rid of iTune and installing Copy Trans Manager. Thank you very much tanstaafl.

Not that I like to support religion wars of any type, not that I care to prove any theory according to which this Company is Evil and that Company is Good, or whatever.
Simply, given the circumstances, I don't think it is unwise to look for some better product and hopefully decrease the chances that something like this happens again.

The Android SDK deleted the key file for my App that was published in the App Store. All I did was tell it to upgrade in Eclipse and it happened to delete the SDK tools directory wehre my keyfile was stored. WTF Google? Luckily it was a free App so no real damage done, just have to re-publish it.

They probably didn't expect you to store data in a binaries directory.

Lame excuse IMO. They should make a backup of user files before deleting anything. Windows Installers have been doing this for years.