It has hit the fan.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

Sadly, my niece decided to go on a spree of deletion. She went into random folders, moved them, deleted them and caused much chaos. She even got my Adobe Photoshop folder, probably to spite me no doubt. Not to mention this week my nib for my pen wore out so ill have to wait a bit to get a new one, ill post some of my old-unrealeased work in the mean time.

[Jaxilon]

That is an outrage! I hope you are joking when you say "out of spite".

Either way, I would recommend password protecting your machine...I also hope your niece is very young...I love my nephew to pieces but if he was old enough to know better and still did something like this to me I think I would haunt him for years (queue evil laughter).

[Robbie]

Do a search online for undelete programs, do it sooner rather than later because the more activity the drive gets, the more damage to the traces of the files there is. You might be surprised what you can recover.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

[Lucianus]

If you REALLY need the files back, bring your machine to any small computer shop and they should be able to recover your data. The only way to permanently delete anything off a harddrive is to either destroy the disks completely or through a complex process that takes a few hours per item deleted. Just to warn you though, data recovery takes time and can be quite expensive. Definately a last ditch resort sort of thing, but it works 99% of the time.

[Robbie]

A license for Getdataback is cheaper than any data recovery service I've ever priced.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

[Heavy Metal Elf]

Depending on file format and amount of data added to the drive since the files' deletions, you may be able to recover quite a bit for free with Recuva, by Piriform software. They make good stuff, and it's free!

[atpollard]

I used one of those freeware recovery programs (just one recomended by a c/net review) and recovered 99% of the data from an external hard drive that suffered the loss of sector 0 and the index (no computer could read anything on the drive), so heck yeah, they do work.

[drector]

Consider a dropbox account - everything I am working on of any importance I keep in it, they keep backups for I think 30 days (at least) so if anything gets deleted you can recover it easily, you can share folders with friends you are collaborating with so the same files appear on both of your computers, if they ever folded your files are safe on your computer, if your hard drive dies your files are safe on their server - you can access from PC, Mac, ipad, iphone, android - pretty much anything, and the first 2 gigs are free - thats plenty of storage for documents, maps, whatever. If you do their tutorial you get an extra 250 meg, and if you get referred by a user you get an extra 250 meg and the referrer gets 250 also, to a 10 gig limit. It is the greatest thing - I live in NY and my partner in an app business lives in Houston, we can pass files back and forth faster than if the 2 of us were sitting side by side.

If anyone wants to use my referrer link to sign up it is http://db.tt/mpFd7wXa use it gets you extra space - or it is www.dropbox.com for the main site.

Sorry if I sound like a commercial - but I love this program/app/service whatever it is.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

Hmm, that reminds me. Just a couple of days ago my last USB port broke, so I can no longer use my tablet or mouse. Expect little to no maps from me.

/end rant

[loogie]

Ya gotta be careful with those cloud-based accounts.. especially free ones... a lot of them (google and ms come to mind) have a nice little addition to their terms that basically means anything you post on their servers becomes their commercial property. I don't think they flex that muscle often, but it's something i've seen and since thought twice about hosting important things.

Dropbox may be different, I don't use it so I don't know... also it usually changes if you pay for the space.

I have my own webspace that's got unlimited space that I got for $4/month... It's got full SSH/FTP/MAIL features so I use that... I'm not supposed to use it for storage, but unless i abuse it i'm sure it's not a big deal.