Friday, May 30, 2008

Accidental Deletion of Files

I have accidentally deleted at least 1-2 thousand of my latest photographs a few days ago. I normally have backup of my files but it so happened that I have not done it consistently lately. My photos are kept in a large external drive.

One Sunday, I was trying to clean up my disk and found a directory called System Volume Information with 9GB on it. I was surprised that I could access it and then I found lots of photographs amongst other things in that directory. So I started to delete the directory and also check to see whether the "actual" files also get deleted. They seemed negative. So I started to "clean" the directory. Only later after I reboot, I found what the system did and to my horror, my latest photos are mostly gone!

System Volume Information is a directory whereby Microsoft used it to "roll back". I am still wondering why is this done on my portable drive. Therefore, you may want to remove this function in a safe way if it is not wanted. So be careful with is directory.

4 comments:

Kong said...

The best backup software I used is one called Genie Version 8. You can select which directory to back up, either full or incremental, automatic at scheduled time or manual.

Anonymous said...

Kong, thanks for your information. I will have to try this out.

Anonymous said...

I'm surprised you could actually access the folder. Under normal circumstances it should not be accesssible at all. Something must've been wrong even before your deletion.

Anonymous said...

Ian, you are right. I am very surprised about this too. That is when accident happen. My pain now is look for those more important photos which I took to see whether they are still there. Aiya... pain in my neck especially when I am so busy leh....
I actually used one of those "undelete" software and the surprising thing is that it didn't actually show up many deleted photos. So, they may still be hiding somewhere... I need to search.