Ooops!

So, I did something really frustrating today. I scanned a picture on my scanner, and it saved the scanned picture to the desktop. I wanted to move it to a different folder, so I copied and pasted the picture into a folder where I keep all my photos until I have a chance to name and edit them before saving them on my external hard drive and backing them up. Then I wanted to delete the original picture from the desktop, so I clicked on it and deleted it, then emptied the recycle bin. When I was done with that, I went to open the folder where I had all my photos saved, and the folder was gone. Somehow I must have had that folder highlighted when I clicked “delete” to remove that picture I scanned. And that folder included all of our family photos since just before Courtland was born. I stopped everything and called my dad, asking if he knew how to recover files that had been deleted after you emptied the recycle bin. He was helpful, and I ended up using Michael’s laptop to go online and download some free software called Restoration at this website, http://www.aumha.org/a/recover.php, (after downloading a couple other software demos that did not work). It ran a scan of my computer and came up with a whole list of files, including all my photos. It took me a while to restore them, since the software didn’t allow me to select more than one file at a time to restore, but I am just glad it worked. There are a handful of photos that didn’t get restored correctly and won’t open now, but luckily those weren’t any of my favorite pictures and it did restore over 400 photos, so I think that is pretty good, especially for free software. So, I just thought I’d post this in case this software might be helpful to anyone else who ever accidentally deleted something they needed.