Lost all pictures

Willow3

Estimable
Feb 3, 2015
2
0
4,510
Need help finding my pictures after I tried backing them up to external hard drive!

I tried to back up all my photos from my windows 7 laptop to an external hard drive & left it transferring overnight as it was estimating the time to copy and got to 36g and counting so I went to bed. When I have come to check the transfer worked ok, only one folder was on the hard drive which wasn't a folder I had in my pictures but an old one of some pictures/videos and I'm not sure where that was even stored. My massive folder of pictures & sub folders is now 'empty' on my pc and not in the recycling bin.

I've tried searching for folders, the recycling bin, system restore to two weeks ago (which has a couple of folders in my pictures but they are all empty).

So they aren't on my pc or my external hard drive. Any idea where they are and how I get them?

The hard drive says it's only got 4g used up out of 260g odd so it's not got them hidden anywhere.
 
You deleted them and it was too much for the Recycle Bin so they're now permanetly gone.

You can try using MiniTools to see if you can recover any of them. Failing that, you can take the hard drives to a Data Recovery specialist and pay a few hundred dollars to get them back.
 

Willow3

Estimable
Feb 3, 2015
2
0
4,510
I thought I had selected my pictures right clicked and copied and pasted into the hard drive folder. There is a chance I cut and paste and for some reason it didn't complete the transfer so all have disappeared but I'm pretty sure I copied and pasted so I could checked they went across before deleting. The only place I can now find any pictures on my laptop is in the downloads folder.

There are shortcuts to some of the folders in my recent viewed places but they won't open as the file is no longer in that location...