WINDOWS VISTA MISSING FILES!

[MajorGoob]

My grandparents converted ALL of their pictures and slides to pictures using some machine from costco. The files are there, but there are no pictures in them. They did this years ago and recently passed the computer on the my sister (Its a fairly good Toshiba Satellite.) and asked me to back up all the pictures. I didnt get around to it until recently and all the pictures in the files from this "machine" are empty. I checked when they first gave it to us and they were empty then as well. They have since disposed of the slides and pictures, so I need to find these. The laptop is running vista and yes, I did check the hidden checkbox problem. I also checked for any system errors that would suggest corruption in the system logs. I cannot find the "Restore to previous versions" button either. My grandmother said she "Backed then up to a thumb drive." but it was just a 512mb. I am worried that she possibly accidentally deleted them afterwords and they didnt all fit on the flash drive.

 

EDIT: I have no idea if she had automatic backup on or not.

[LabRat]

maybe they thought they backed it up. when I first started using pc's i went through something similar. the data inside the folders never made it to their destination.

maybe try recuva and search for pictures with that? if they're on the drive they should be found. with a click you can recover them.

[MajorGoob]

46 minutes ago, LabRat said:

maybe they thought they backed it up. when I first started using pc's i went through something similar. the data inside the folders never made it to their destination.

maybe try recuva and search for pictures with that? if they're on the drive they should be found. with a click you can recover them.

Recuva? Is it a reliable program?

[LabRat]

it works.

[MajorGoob]

7 minutes ago, LabRat said:

it works.

I just tried shadow Explorer and couldnt find them. It only went back to the beginning of the year. They converted them to slides in 2012. I dont know anymore.

[LabRat]

what's shadow explorer?

[MajorGoob]

3 minutes ago, LabRat said:

what's shadow explorer?

Similar. It uses the Shadow Files created by windows vista. Basically a secret copy of everything. I also tried Recuva and couldnt find anything that way either. It may have been several years since this happened, so am I doing something wrong or will it not work that far back?

 

[LabRat]

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

i don't know what you're doing. if you opened the software and looked through everything and tried to run it..... and found nothing ( which I find it hard to believe it didn't find anything - even something other than those particular files ) then they never made it when they were copied, and you might have to look at the program a little harder to get it to work right. you're sitting in front of it not me. all I can do is point you in the right direction.