Accidentally deleted a bunch of files from appdata/local, what do I do now?

Asked by XOIIO (18328

) April 9th, 2014

So, I had a program acting up, so just to check if it was something in the appdata/local folder, I tried deleting the files from there, halfway through my automatic response to seeing stuff in recycle bin was to empty it, I did and realised what I did, I hit cancel but it didn’t work, I fucked up big time. Now UAC isn’t working, no matter what you click (yes or no) it doesn’t work, and I’m not sure what else will be going wrong. I can’t run any recovery programs because of that and they won’t keep the folder structure.

Is there anything I can do or did I just fuck up this install and I need to do a whole reinstall to fix this? sigh

Windows
7

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4 Answers

Well I rebooted, a fair bit of stuff has come back, I’ll have to see if issues pop up running different programs, hopefully none are really screwed up but the OS fixed whatever it needed it seems.

XOIIO (18328

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Aren’t they in the trashcan ? i.e. recoverably from the trashcan?

dabbler (18896

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@dabbler No, like I said I emptied it due to habit.

XOIIO (18328

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There are file recovery programs out there that follow inodes not listed in the directory (i.e. erased & removed from recyhhcle bin) along their sector to sector links to reconstruct the original file if there has not been something written over those sectors in the meantime. I’ve used utilities to retrieve files that were :“deleted” from SD camera cards a few times.
But, I don’t have a specific recommendation for a disk filesystem file recovery tool. google for that if you you’re having trouble due to lacking files.
With the inode-following tools you’ll have to rename the files to their necessary original names and coming up with those names might be tedious. For recovered photos that’s not an issue.

dabbler (18896

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