Computer geek stuff....restoring a lost file

[Rusty Hills Farm]

Hokay. For days now I have been working on an image. It started out black on white and I, using MGI PHoto Suite, have been changing it to blue on black. I FINALLY, after almost 20 hours of work, got exactly what I wanted. I saved the image and instead of saving it, the program crashed. Now the original file is corrupted. The computer says it contains no data. I tried going back a day and doing a system restore, but the file still has no data. Is there any way to find the missing data, or am I just out of luck and need to start all over?

Rusty

 

[littleridgefarmer]

If you went back a day and restored and still has no data then you are most likely out of luck. Each time you make a change if you have it set to take a backup you should be able to pull up the filename.*.bak

Try that

 

[Rusty Hills Farm]

Unfortunately I don't have it set to make automatic backups. Thanks, though.

 

[ivan3]

Did you, by chance, search your drives for ALL image files (were you working with jpg's bmp's tiff's?) using windows explorer? Some image software will cache intermediates automatically don't know the specific software you're using.
For example, search for: *.*jpg on all drives and sort results by date (there might be some copies stashed, though this is just a last gasp sort of try).

Good luck

 

[GrayDragon]

Try your temp file. You might get lucky. Make sure you are set to view hidden files and folders, or you'll never find it. It will be one of the italicized one, and usually the first few letters of the file name and then a bunch of numbers and letters.

 

[Boyd]

if all that fails try an undelete program. PM me if you need to go to this route and I can email the program and how to for it.

 

[wombat]

Check the temp directories as mentioned above, and check the recycle bin for deleted temporary copies.

If all else fails, look on the web for undelete utilities. There are quite a few out there. I've not used any of late, so I can't make a recommendation. One of my co-workers used one from DiskInternals a while back.

 

[ivan3]

Forgot: Check your documentation. MGI PHoto Suite might save working files with a specific file extension (like Photoshop's saving work as PSD's).

 

[Rusty Hills Farm]

FOUND IT! It was a backup with a different file extension and not the completely reworked file, but it's close enough that I won't have to spend hours on it!

Thank you all.