I'm a young artist who produces music and writes songs. I recently restored my computer after a virus, but I later realized that the Documents/Image-Line folder may not have been copied to my external backup drive. I'm not sure whether I forgot to include it or the backup failed, and I didn't verify the files before resetting the computer. Is there any realistic way to recover my music projects?
3 Answers
If professional recovery is too expensive, work from a clone rather than the original drive. Remove the affected drive, connect it through an enclosure, and use a Linux live environment with ddrescue to make a sector-by-sector copy onto another drive. Keep the original untouched, then run recovery software such as PhotoRec against the clone and save recovered files to a separate drive. You’ll need multiple drives with enough space, and recovered files may lose their original names and folder structure.
Stop using the computer immediately. Every new file or installation could overwrite parts of the missing projects. If the files are extremely valuable, the safest option is a professional data-recovery service. They may be able to recover some or all of the data, depending on what kind of reset occurred and how much the drive has been used afterward.
Before attempting recovery, check whether the Image-Line folder exists anywhere on the external drive under another path, and check cloud storage, autosave folders, recent project locations, or backups created by the music software. Also determine whether the computer was fully reset or merely had Windows reinstalled, because a full reset can make recovery much less likely.
I didn’t check the backup carefully before resetting, so I can’t confirm whether the folder was ever copied. That was my mistake, and I’m going to stop using the computer while I decide between professional recovery and cloning it first.