I'm clearing out cloud storage and moving older photos and videos onto my laptop. While unzipping folders and merging their contents, I repeatedly chose the option to replace files when they had the same names. Later, I realized that some of the files with matching names were actually different, and I may have overwritten several hundred unique files. Is there any way to recover the previous versions, similar to restoring an earlier version of a Word document? I also ignored a duplicate once and later deleted the remaining folder, but that particular batch was small and isn't as important.
2 Answers
Usually not, unless you already had point-in-time backups, file history, snapshots, or another versioning system enabled. If the files were truly overwritten, their original data has been replaced rather than simply moved to a recycle bin, so normal recovery tools may not help.
The best chance would be a backup or version-history feature that captured the files before the merge. Stop writing new data to the laptop if the files are especially important, since continued use could reduce the chances of recovering anything that was only deleted rather than overwritten. For future transfers, compare files first and keep a separate backup before merging folders.
Understood. I’ll definitely verify duplicate files and make a backup before doing another large merge.
Thanks—that’s a painful reminder not to click through those replacement prompts so quickly.