HELP! My ex erased pictures from Canon S400!

Hello,

I am desperate for any help anyone can give me. Long story short, boyfriend

erases all pictures fro computer, Treo650 and Canon S400.He then leaves and

takes my Canon S400 with him, he comes back 2 weeks later to get the rest of his

stuff and I just found the camera. He left a video message to me, but erased

everything else. Is there a way to restore what he deleted? I now have the

memory card from the camera. Also, if anyone knows if I can restore picture

deleted from my iMAC and my Treo650, that'd be great!The sad thing is some of

the pictures were of my aunt, who passed away recently.

Also, if it helps, my iMAC PowerPC G4is running OS X 10.4.9. I use iphoto.

Thank you in advance to anyone who can help. Julianna

Can't help with the computer or camera stuff, but please change your locks! If you can't afford a locksmith, you can buy new locks at any hardware store and install them yourself with a screwdriver.

Sooooo, your single. <wink, wink> There is photo recovery software which can normally recover deleted photos. If you ex recorded video over them then they are probably lost or a portion of them are lost. You can do a web search or call your local camera store.

A data recovery program might do the trick, at least for your camera card.

http://www.download.com/Art-Plus-Digital-Photo-Recovery/3000-12511_4-10555290.html?tag=lst-0-3

 

If that doesn't work, there are data recovery services out there, but I hear they can get pretty expensive.

Most of the pictures on your computer are probably still there. But the longer you wait and the more you use it, the greater the chances that the space on your drive where the are located will be reallocated to other files. You need to get the iMAC to a data recovery specialist ASAP.

Or you could ask him for the copies he surely made...

First off, I'm sorry to hear that you're dealing with an unreasonable person. I hope the situation gets better for you, and soon!

 

Next, there are a lot of programs that can undelete files, lots under $50, some free. here are a couple I picked at random...from versiontracker.com, http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22589

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23443

 

it's one of the highest rated ones (at versiontracker) for Mac.

 

The key thing is to NOT USE your computer/camera/phone until you get the software and try to recover whatever you can! Hopefully a Mac user will respond with a specific program recommendation for you. And, finally, if money is no object you can definitely get the photos back using data recovery services. I've used http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/ before, but they really are expensive. (I spent over $1200 to have a hard drive restored, though it was a Rush/Sunday job...)

 

Good luck and good wishes,

Greg.

I've had good results from DataRescue's PhotoRescue for retrieving images from memory

cards when they've been inadvertently deleted, camera hiccups, etc.

 

I'll second the recommendation not to use your computer until you've done the data

recovery process. Once you do get the files back, you'll want to start doing some sort of

organized backups, preferably keeping a copy somewhere else where it won't be lost if

there's a fire, loser boyfriend, or other disaster. External disks are cheap, and so is the

SuperDuper! program.

 

Depending on how savvy your ex was, they might just be sitting in the iPhoto Trash folder,

wouldn't that be a nice surprise :-)

 

Juliana, if you're in the SF Bay area and are willing to bring your computer to the Stanford/

Palo Alto area, send me email and I'll try to help you recover your stuff.

I'm kind of considering suggesting a police report. Had these been prints in an album, destroying them - your property - might have risen to the level of malicious mischief or similar offense. It also documents his behavior to some extent should he continue to be a problem. Keep track, with someone else, what you do/spend to recver the images if you can.

Sandisk includes flash memory card recovery software at least I think with their Extreme III and Extreme IV cards; it is supposed to work pretty well. You can buy a new Extreme III card--even just to get the software, if necessary--for under $50, and will have a good memory card too.

 

As for the files on the computer, unless your EXBF was particularly malicious and resourceful, the chance is good that you can recover most or all of them. Actually, I would tend to think that the Mac would come with some sort of undelete utility. If not, there are certainly many out there, as other have shown. When computers delete files in the ordinary way, they don't actually delete them, they just note that the space the files occupy is available to be written over. If you don't save something that actually writes over them, they're still there.

Sorry to hear about your dilemna, and I can't help with anything technical, but it just stresses backup, backup, backup, cds and dvds in a safe place. A little side-track here: A friend of mine just went through a nasty divorce, and her ex demanded half the pictures. We sorted through piles, most of which were of HER family, and I told her, keep all the negatives. I also said "He wants pictures...we'll give him some!" I sorted through stacks of my own, which needed a good housecleaning, and some really crappy pictures inlaws had given me (some of these worse than crappy.) People he doesn't know, places he won't figure out where the heck they're taken, out of focus pictures of rooms being renovated...I'd love to see him try to figure those out...hehehe... She's also not as mean as I am. There were boxes and carousels of slides. I told her, choose what you want, then dump them all in one big carton and let HIM sort them out.

 

Rose-Marie

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

One issue that no one has brought up is the possibility that there's the chance that software was used to render the files unrecoverable. Programs such as Privacy Guardian offer "Bleach" and "Shred" functions that erase a file, overwrite the area, erase again, and so on for about a half dozen passes. If something like this was used I don't think that there's any recovery software that will help. Hopefully the ex boyfriend wasn't clever or malicious enough to go to that extreme, however.

Clive, I agree that pcinspector is a great freeware! I've used it to recover photos from several cameras/cards.

 

But, Julianna's computer is a mac and pcinspector is only for windows computers...Maybe it'll help someone else though.

For those on the edge of their seats wondering how this all turned out, it appears Julianna's

ex may have been, uh, not a mensch, but also was not very effective at wiping out her stuff.

 

Fortunately, DiskWarrior's scavenging abilities were up to repairing the HD damage caused by

Norton's disk repair tools. When your disk is messed up, the last thing you want to do is to

run a program that mucks around changing the disk before you have a chance to review the

results!