It started thundering really close to my home last night, so I immediately grabbed my mic & field recorder, wind cover, got some really fantastic recordings. I needed to transfer to my PC, I made a huge mistake in using CUT and PASTE (CTRL-X, CTRL-V) from the field recorder to PC, an error occured in data transfer, and I lost them. That will teach me to cut files instead of copying them and then deleting them after. Never cutting & pasting again. I still think if an error occurs then you shouldn't lose the original file you were moving =/ I am not sure if this is changed in Windows 7. *slaps head*

That is a shame however did you try data recovery on your recorder? Its not 100% guarantee but many many many times it works.

this is something microsoft have been needing to fix for years. It should automatically have this behaviour (copy and paste, then delete upon success) - if any failure occurs, then everything is fine still.

Quote: Original post by Chrono1081
That is a shame however did you try data recovery on your recorder? Its not 100% guarantee but many many many times it works.

No. Thanks I might give it a shot.

Do you have any tools / methods you can recommend? I don't know much regarding data recovery.

That's why you use a mac for audio :) <3

You know you can use CTRL-Z to un-delete / un-cut-paste files in Windows right? I don't have an external USB device handy to test - but if you cut-paste/delete an icon on your desktop then press CTRL-Z it comes back.

Nope.

When the paste fails, it's gone. No undo!

Ah well. I managed to get one of the files back.

I'm pretty sure cut/paste works like _Sauce_ said when cutting / pasting from separate disks.

Eg. You have a computer with 2 HDD's, HDA and HDB.
You cut a file from HDA and paste to HDB - but it actually copies rather than cutting and deletes the source when it's finished.

I can remember a handful of times I've been moving large amounts of files from one HDD to another and when the disk fills up it throws up an error message and any file that didn't successfully copy still remained intact where it was.

Then again maybe Windows handles things differently if it gets a "no more space left" error rather than a "hey I feel like being an ass and ruining your day by screwing up this simple task for no good reason" error. :P

I'd go the data recovery route. Run a low-level disk recovery software to get it back....though if you've used the source disk (in this case the field recorder i believe) there's a chance you've overwritten the portion of the disk that contained the files you're looking for.

I think UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) has a program or 2 on it for recovering data, if not I'm sure some other multi-purpose boot CD has one. I can't think of any specific names at the moment, as I haven't had to do that in a long time. But I assure you there are plenty of free and easy programs out there that will do it.