Cap wrote:I took 30+ pictures and mistakenly deleted the images from my C drive after cleaning the images from my camera. Darn!
I do not think I can retrieve them from my hard drive. Or can I.
Well here's the deal with that, yes you can assuming they were not overwritten from the drive, there's also software like this that works on the camera cards themselves. The problem with the hard drive is even downloading and installing it may overwrite the files, matter of fact simply viewing this page might do that. Same thing with the camera, if you "delete" them from the camera and don't take any pictures you'll be able to recover them.
This is free, I think the camera software costs money. There's a few other programs available but I used this one myself on my brothers computer and recovered every image his wife had stored on a newly reformatted drive.
Actually multiple copies of many of them because she had opened and resaved some of them. If you have a second drive save and install it on that.
http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm
For future reference if anyone ever does anything like that with some really important files like irreplaceable family photos your best bet is to not do anything with the computer. It's tricky situation but turning it off can even cause you to lose the files if windows happens to you use the space that the files occupied, same thing for turning it on, browsing the internet or opening and closing applications. The least activity you do the more likely you will be able to recover them. When you "delete" a file all that does is clear the space on the hard drive, they are still there until they get overwritten by other data.
I haven't looked for such a program because I frequently make backups of my most important files but Ideally you'd want to run something like this that will work off a live CD like Knoppix which doesn't require any hardrive activity at all. I keep a Knoppix CD around myself just in case windows decides it doesn't want to start.
Lastly they do have professional services for recovering data from broken or even physically damaged drives but it's a lot $$$.