Recovering Overwritten .jpg files

Hey everyone, got a problem here.

Is there any way to recover .jpg files that have been overwritten by other .jpg files with the same name?

So here is the situation, My wife came to me the other day complaining that some of the picture files that she uploaded to an online picture printing service (Snapfish) did not get printed as they should have....

Upon further investigation it seems that the thumbnails attached to a number of pictures in her particular folder do not "actually" reflect the picture that is contained within the file.

So basically after a bit of interrogation I found out that she had "organized" the pictures that she wanted to upload into a single folder. What I think happened is that when she started moving files from here and there into a single location, some of those files happened to have the same filename(due to the way our camera allocates the filenames), and while she was working away she just started overwriting the files that had the same name.

While investigating the folder in question I copied the entire folder contents into another folder - this corrected the thumbnail issue in the second folder (so that the thumbnails reflected the file contents) and allowed me to compare the two folders' thumbnails to see just how many pictures were overwritten. The number stands at 73 pictures, most of which were the only copies of pictures from the hospital during the birth of our first child.

So basically my question can again be distilled into a single sentence:

Is there any way to recover .jpg files that have been overwritten by other .jpg files with the same name?

Here is a little more background info,
-The drive(s) where the pictures were originally stored/erased consist of two WD 35GB Raptor Hard Drives in a raid 0 array

-The pictures may have been overwritten as long as 8-9 months ago, The Wife is not sure exactly.
-I do not think that I have reformatted and reinstalled windows in that time period....
-I have used Raxxco perfect disk 8.0 several times since then to defragment the drive however.
-I have all of the original file names written down if that makes any difference.

Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks all

Try PC Inspector http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?Language=1
With a time period so long I kinda doubt you'll be able to recover anything, especially since you have defragmented.
RAID 0 spells trouble anyway, if one drive dies all your data is lost... You do have a backup of your important data, right?:eek:
If not... $100 gets you an external drive which you can use for backing up stuff that you care about

Yeah I have been meaning to pick up another drive for storage only, I actually purchased one the day before this whole debacle sprang up...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Stifle

Yeah I have been meaning to pick up another drive for storage only, I actually purchased one the day before this whole debacle sprang up...

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Also CD's and DVD's are dirt cheap, honestly I see no excuse for anyone not to back up their important files. I may sound harsh but...
All my photos and important files go to a redundant array which is being backed up nightly to tape (I'm a bit paranoid, but a tape doesn't get wiped if the power supply decides to take a dump and fry my drives, nor does it get wiped by a virus in the unlikely event I get one)
Also I'm seriously considering getting a safe deposit box to store backups of critical stuff... you never know when your house burns, there was a small fire in the building not long ago.
:flames:

I like PC Inspector, but I mostly use Runtime Software's GetDataBack A trial download is free, and you can use the program's built-in viewers to look at files you want to recover before you buy the software; you can view them, but not save or edit them. Their RAID Reconstructor tool can sometimes generate an image that may let you retrieve files without running additional data recovery, but I usually use it in conjunction with GetDataBack.

CeeBee is right when he says that you shouldn't expect too much. From your post, I'm not even certain if you are still running the original drives in the same array. Anyway, I hope we've given you some leads on tools that may help. and trying them is free.

Yeah, the array is the same - the drives have not changed.

I think that the impetus of my question was more along the lines of - Can "overwritten" files be recovered like simply deleted ones usually can?

Overwritten files - no. The data of the "new" files replaces the data of the "old" files.
Now if the operation was a "cut-paste" it *might* be possible to restore some of them as the information is not replaced, but the pointer describing the location of the file is changed.
Also try to restore the data from the media that was in the camera... that might yield some results even if it was formatted.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Stifle

Yeah, the array is the same - the drives have not changed.

I think that the impetus of my question was more along the lines of - Can "overwritten" files be recovered like simply deleted ones usually can?

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I think the impetus of our responses was more along the lines of- Nope.

Recovery may be possible to some degree, but you aren't likely to recover all the files. The only way to find out is to try. You can do that for free, but the process is usually time consuming and is likely to be frustrating.