I was copying 1000's of photos from a laptop directly onto a camera....

I had right click/copied a folder (full of photos), went looking for the right place to drop them into, couldn't find it, but then upon returning to the desktop, the original folder was gone!

I then hit Paste on the desktop and all I got was an empty Shortcut to the folder. I never hit paste into the camera folder, it seems the folder just disappeared!

I did the usual tings to try and find them; undo, searching for the file names, searching for all photos on the system and they had completely vanished from the computer. The strange thing was that it happened instantaneously, waaay to fast for them to be actually deleted.

I even downloaded a basic recovery program and it was able to find a few hundred, but because it was just a trial version, the program woulndt let me open any of the thumbnails. So it seems the photos are somewhere, but just hidden or something! What the [bleep] happened?? Would a system restore work or anything? Its really weird, and its a huge pity cos the photos are all of my photos from my summer in California.

Can anyone advise the best file recovery program to pay for?

Or should I bring the laptop to somesort of specialist and pay them to do it?


Any help is much appreciated....

Here is a free one
click on me
Cheers
Peterm

Free is very nice however if you'd like a very nice and cost effecient program,Nucleus Kernel for FAT32 and NTFS is a really amazing and reliable program.

Try Recuva, it is free.

Thanks for all the response.
I tried some software and I didnt manage to get many pics back. The laptop that it was on had less than 10% disc space left so any remaining files would have got over written or corrupted very easily I presume.

Then I would have to say, Go buy a cheap External Hd or a decent sized Jump drive and have it recover to one of the two.