Adobe Photoshop Horror - Extracting files

[Pussywillow]

My poor neighbour has contrived to delete his family photos. His laptop is a 3 year old Toshiba Equium.

I have run searches looking for pictures on his hard drive and all I can find is 'odds and sods' like you get on anybody's comp, not his pics.

The only place I can view them is in a programme called Adobe Photoshop Album Starter'. I can see them in their entirety in there, but no way will it let me copy them anywhere else. I have 'drilled' down and all I can find is a 'cache file' sitting in My documents/All Users/Applicationata/Adobe/Photshopalbum/catalog.

Is there any chance of copying these files from adobe anywhere else or are they lost for good ?

[Sylvander]

1. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.2 (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/starter.html)

The photo's certainly are not "gone".
I'd guess they've been changed in form by being recompressed into one large archive file that uses "Album Starter" to view. [Not the smartest move if not wanted]

I notice that in the "Help Document" PDF file at the website linked above, it explains how to "Burn the Photos to CD".
I wonder what form they will be in on the CD? JPG files?
Give it a try.

The demo video also shows that it's possible to attach to an email or upload to a web hosting site.
Again, I wonder what form those would be in.

2. The other possible approach would be to attempt to "un-delete" the original [jpg?] files that were deleted after being copied & compressed into the new archive file. [I'm guessing that's what was done. Have you checked the Recycle Bin?]
What file system is in use on that partition? NTFS or FAT32?
The FREE "Emergency Boot CD" [EBCD] includes an undelete program, but only works on FAT partitions.
I found THIS (http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/) FREE prog out on the web that works on NTFS & FAT. Don't know how good it is; haven't used it.

[Paul Komski]

If valuable files have disappeared then certain first principles must be applied and the first of these is to stop accessing the operating system or drive directly by booting to it. Each time the system is booted increases the likelihood of overwriting disappeared files.

Either remove the hard drive and access it from another computer or make a literal byte-for-byte clone of it as an image file onto or do a total drive copy to another hard drive - an external USB hard drive usually being ideal. Copying to CDs/DVDs is another less satisfactory option.

The choice is yours and only you know how important the data is.

Once cloned in one form or another you can experiment to your heart's content in the knowledge that you can get back to where you are now.

GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org) is the premier application (IMHO and with a lot of good results round here) for at least scanning your application from another PC and of being capable of making a literal clone.

You could also use ImageForDOS or BiNG (in my sig) to image the relevant partition to a USB drive or to CDs. Both these applications produce compressed but literal image clones. Literal clones are important if you need to be able to recover deleted material. Running dd from any Linux distro, notably from Knoppix, (also in my sig) is another way of getting such data "safe".