Lost all images?

Hello everyone,

I think my wife lost all the pictures from her 13" aluminum macbook last night. It's a hard lesson in backing up, she was pretty devastated. She saw "all images", thought it was a folder with a bunch of temp files, cleared the folder, then emptied the trash. I know this has happened to numerous people.

We haven't found any way to get the files back. Is there any way to do this? Is time machine on by default at all? Thanks for any advice before considering the pictures completely lost.

Eric

japhyr said:

We haven't found any way to get the files back. Is there any way to do this? Is time machine on by default at all? Thanks for any advice before considering the pictures completely lost.

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Only you (well, I mean she) can answer the question regarding Time Machine. Did she have an external drive and was Time Machine on and working? If it was, then you're fine.

If it wasn't, you're not going to get those pictures back unless you:

a. STOP USING THAT HARD DRIVE IMMEDIATELY. Can't stress this enough.
b. Contact a data-recovery company like DriveSavers (highly recommended). It will cost you $1200 or more, but they WILL get those pictures back if you follow step a.

All images folder? As in the all images folder in the sidebar of the finder?

Only you (well, I mean she) can answer the question regarding Time Machine. Did she have an external drive and was Time Machine on and working?

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We never set Time Machine up with an external drive. However, when she looked at Time Machine afterward, it seemed to be on. I was wondering if it does any kind of default archiving internally.

Contact a data-recovery company like DriveSavers (highly recommended). It will cost you $1200 or more, but they WILL get those pictures back if you follow step a.

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We had considered something like this. A couple hundred might be worthwhile, but not $1000. Is it really likely to be that expensive for data recovery from a drive that was not physically damaged?

All images folder? As in the all images folder in the sidebar of the finder?

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Yes, that is the one.

Thank you for the responses.

All images folder? As in the all images folder in the sidebar of the finder?

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Yes, that is the one.

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If that's the case I'm not so sure it was deleted, rather that it may have been moved.
I may be wrong, but click on finder in the menu bar, select system preferences, click sidebar tab, and check the box with all images folder.
I hope that this is all that it was!

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I may be wrong, but click on finder in the menu bar, select system preferences, click sidebar tab, and check the box with all images folder.

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We went there, and those last three boxes (all images, all movies, all documents) were checked. We unchecked and checked them again, and nothing appeared under all images.