[SOLVED] Data Recovery

[guardian1056]

So I had a bunch of files on my desktop and it was getting very cluttered, so i decided to move them to a secondary hard drive to clean up space. I had no idea that the secondary hard drive was full. When i transferred over the files everything looked fine so i deleted the original files from the desktop. So i checked a few days later and they were all shortcuts. And the originals were gone. So i ran just about every recovery tool i could trying to find some hope but none of them found the files. not even the overwritten files. There was nothing. Is there any hope? And would data recovery services be able to recover my data? I think it was stupid of windows to not let me know that it was full and to just make shortcuts. i shouldve paid attention to the drives capacity but it windows should've warned me.

Any help is much appreciated!

 

[USAFRet]

It didn't make shortcuts because the drive was full.
It made shortcuts because that is the way that you performed the procedure.

If it was full, and you tried moving the actual files, it would have simply stopped and told you it was full.
It does NOT just default to making shortcuts with a full drive.

Recovery?
Where were the actual files? Were the things on your desktop the "files", or the shortcuts?

 

[guardian1056]

It didn't make shortcuts because the drive was full.
It made shortcuts because that is the way that you performed the procedure.

If it was full, and you tried moving the actual files, it would have simply stopped and told you it was full.
It does NOT just default to making shortcuts with a full drive.

Recovery?
Where were the actual files? Were the things on your desktop the "files", or the shortcuts?

Hey! Thanks for the quick reply! The files on the desktop were the real files and the ones on my secondary HDD are the shortcuts.

 

[USAFRet]

Right.
So the files lived on the desktop.
What you created on the other drive were simply shortcuts.
Windows did not do this by itself.
This was done in the method you dragged and dropped to the other drive.

When you clicked on one of those shortcuts, it simply opened its original file that lived on the desktop.
Later, you deleted the actual file.

Recovery?
Try Recuva and PhotoRec.
You WILL need somewhere to recover to.
Do not expect 100% recovery.