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[lollavid]

I was using Picasa to organize my folders on my DNS-320. I have 2 1.5 TB Green Drives and had a copy of them on each. I was consolidating them onto one drive and then was going to recopy them onto both drives in the new file structure. SOMEHOW Picasa deleted the new consolidated folder with all my photos. I am totally devastated. It has pictures of my children's birth plus everything else.
Does anybody have an idea what I can do? I immediately shut down the DNS-320 and now have the drive connected to a SATA on my Windows 7 pc. I don't know anything about linux but understand I may have to install it to gain access to the ext2 format.
I can't tell you how much I would appreciate some support. It means so much to me.

[Hard Harry]

I think JavaLawyer is the best one to help with this, but I will take a stab at it. First check Account Management > Network Shares options and see if you have the Recycle Bin and if you do, that will show you where your pictures are.

If not..then things get alot more complicated. The main problem is your computer didn't delete the files, it told another copmputer (your DNS-320) to delete them. I think the DNS-320 uses EXT3, so if you removed the drive, put it into a linux system and used some data recovery software, it "might" work. I say might because EXT3 is set up for reasons of stability, EXT3 0's out the block pointers.

Another way to go, is check to see if maybe your Picaso is backed up in the cloud? Do you have Dropbox linked to your account? Or maybe backup to Google Drive?

[lollavid]

No Dropbox/ Cloud. I am trying a program right now to scan the drive for ext2/ ext3 through windows but so far it's only turned up with a random assortment and they are only thumbnails. When the scan is complete I will put the drive back into the DNS-320 to see if I have a recycle bin set up. However, I never did that manually and I believe it is not the default setting.

[ivan]

I think you may have lost them if you didn't have a separate backup.

I say you may have lost them because you are using a program that might write to the drive which could overwrite what you deleted.

Your first action should have been to use an undelete program to change the status flag of those files and so recover them.  We use DFSee http://www.dfsee.com/ for most of our low level actions on disk drives.  It comes in versions for OS/2, windows, linux and DOS.  To use it from windows on a Ext2/3 drive you would need to have an installable file system (IFS) added to windows but once you have that you stand a very good chance of recovering most, if not all, of your deleted files. 

[priitv8]

I can also recommend the PhotoRec (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec), which does a sector-level scan of disk content and re-creates a file for any bitstream it considers to have a picture file content.

[dnsbughunter]

I've had a lot of luck with Stellar Phoenix for recovering dead drives and deleted files. A friend had reformatted after some drive errors and we still managed to get literally everything off it. I was impressed.

[bill945]

Wow, this happened to me too.  I was able to recover almost the entire drive but it took a ton of time.  Here's what I did and I hope it'll work for you with the last resort being to ship your drive to a disk recovery service like http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/ which is really expensive but from what I have heard money well spent if the data is that important to you.

1) If you can, clone the drive to another drive and work with the cloned drive and not the original.

2) I attached the cloned drive to my PC as an external drive using a spare SATA external drive enclosure.

3) Go to http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download.  This situation happened a while back and I used testdisk-6.14-WIP.  Again since it happened a while ago, I can't give you specifics but I pretty much just followed the instructions.  Note: it's very time consuming soooo take your time.

The photos on my drive weren't all lost and I was able to recover, I'd say, 95% of them.

Good luck!!!

[priitv8]

3) Go to http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download.

It's worth noting, that TestDisk and PhotoRec are bro and sis. From same parents

[bill945]

Hi Lollavid,

If you want to mount and see the partitions and directory on your SATA drive, here's what works for me - I installed ext2fsd on my PC (http://www.ext2fsd.com). 

I have it running right now and a test hard drive that was formatted on the DNS 320; I can see all the partitions, directories and files.

 
I can copy and delete to the SATA drive just as if it was a normal PC drive.

Good luck!!