I've accidently deleted a small folder of photos of which I don't have a backup. I know it's not as bad as some unfortunate folk have done on here but I still feel like an idiot and would desperately like to get them back.
I was connected via afp to my readynas duo on raid-1 and deleted the wrong folder whilst moving some pics around.
Journaling is disabled so I gather from these forums that I may stand a chance?
As I understand it, I need to remove one of the drives and connect it to a linux running pc. Trouble is I am not very good at all with linux and would much rather do this in windows or mac. Could I just hook it up directly to my computer and load up a piece of software like this:
http://www.piriform.com/recuva
Would windows recognise the drive? I would really appreciate any advice, or maybe even some other suggestions on software that might work under windows or mac?
My other concern is that I have read, though possibly misunderstood, that upon re-insertion of my drive into the readynas duo that it might reformat my drives? Is this right, and would I need to backup the entire drive before putting it back in?
Sorry if I've completely got the wrong end of the stick here but I just wanted to double check before I go and make things worse!
The first thing you should do is create an image of the second drive using software like Norton Ghost or it's freeware pendants. This is mainly to preserve state but may also give you a copy of your data you can safely work with while still having the original available. If you don't feel comfortable doing this stuff and the recovery procedures I strongly recommend you ask a computer savvy friend or seek professional assistance. At any rate don't write additional data to the NAS for this may very likely overwrite the space on the drive where your original picture data was stored. Chances are that you already overwrote part or all of that data by copying stuff around before noticing you accidentially deleted the wrong folder. So again: if you want to have at least a small chance of recovering the data, do not write any more stuff to the NAS.
Thankfully I noticed that I was deleting the wrong folder whilst it was happening so I hit cancel before it had deleted all of the photos, though a big chunk are gone. I then immediately turned the Readynas off so I couldn't overwrite the deleted drive space, so hopefully it should still be there, somewhere.
When you say I should use something like Norton Ghost to create an image, do you mean I should first remove one of the drives from the Readynas and connect it directly or can the image be credited over a network via the Readynas?
If I have to remove it will I have the formatting issue I mentioned in my original post?
To make an image (clone) the disk, you need to remove it from the NAS. Since you said you've already shut down the NAS this shouldn't be a problem. For the imaging software makes a sector by sector copy of the drive it doesn't matter what on-disk format ison the drive, the imaging software doesn't care. To actually read the disk you may need a Linux box because at least Windows won't be able to deal with the format used on ReadyNAS hard drives.
Recover deleted files from corrupted, deleted or missing fat & ntfs file system with the help of a Kernel for Windows Data Recovery software. The tool is very easy to operate and has got three various data recovery modes like Quick Scan, Extensive Scan and File Trace that makes entire data recovery operation very easy.
