New Acer deleted files without prior warning on a external hard drive

A question about : New Acer deleted files without prior warning on a external hard drive

A bit of a cautionary tale to computer luddites like me when attempting to create a recovery back up disk upon setting up a new laptop.

I just bought my first laptop today, an acer aspire. We'd been struggling along with my husband's Dell for a while, but finally agreed I needed one of my own.

I set everything up within 30 minutes, but when I went to go on the internet it reminded me I needed to do a recovery back up file just in case. I didn't have anything to hand, but an external hard drive that we use to store the back ups of my husband's files and about seven years of photos from an old digital camera.

I plugged it in and proceeded with the back up. A message immediately came up that it was searching for a suitable device and it had found the hard drive. I clicked on that, and clicked next. the message said I needed 16gb of memory and everything on the drive would be deleted.

I screached and immediately pulled out the hard drive, but too late. Everything deleted. All gone. It was instantaneous. There was no message about a lack of space, no message asking me if it was ok to proceed with the deletion. Nothing. It just did it. Nothing in the recycle bin either. It even manage to change the name of the drive.

Having never had my own computer before I had no idea the back up needed to be a 16gb empty device, and there was no message on the screen during the procedure to tell me.

I had foolishly stored the photos on there a few months ago as they had been taking up a lot of space on my husband's laptop. Seven years of memories gone. I'm in floods.

Best answers:

• How big was/is the drive ? Is a hard drive or a USB stick ? All may not be lost depending on the answers.
• While you're waiting for people to advise you, in the meantime do not plug the harddrive into the computer or try recovering the files yourself. It's possible that any actions you do now may hinder your chances of recovery.
  So wait until somebody knowledgeable can help you before plugging the drive in.
• OK then read this https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step and try photorec , and calm down read and then follow the instructions, don't rush
• umm , not 16g of memory , maybe 16g or storage space ,
• do a recuva deep scan, also run it on the other laptop
  pulling the usb lead out in the middle of a write may have done the damage.
  There are several nexts and warnings before it overwrites anything
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBJsh-lkQt8
• Can you copy the output into this thread ? using the edit option in the black screen and then use paste in here
• PhotoRec 7.0-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, January 2015
  Christophe GRENIER
  https://www.cgsecurity.org
  PhotoRec is free software, and
  comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
  Select a media (use Arrow keys, then press Enter):
  >Disk /dev/sda - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO) - ST500LT012-1DG142
  Disk /dev/sdb - 160 GB / 149 GiB (RO) - Hitachi HTS545016B9A300
  >[Proceed ] [ Quit ]
  There's some more gubbins at the bottom about checking HD Jumpers, Bios etc if the correct size is not displayed, but that didn't get copied across.
• OK the external one is /dev/sdb so use the arrows and then press enter and then when it says search press enter and lets see what comes up