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Hi
Please bare with me as I'm not technically minded at all and need to be talked through items in layman's terms as simply as possible
I have and old PC like 25 years old
I would like to retrieve deleted pictures and videos which have been deleted from the recycling bin
Is there anyway I could do this please
 
while what you are after is theoretically possible, in reality it is much more difficult.

yes deleted things go to the Recycle Bin, and yes, even after deletion from there, they are still on the hard drive. but that by no means makes them easy to recover, in fact in my experience, recovery is almost always never achieved.

sorry for the sad news right from the get-go, but that is after all the reason why we backup.

you shouldn't use that drive you are trying to recover from as any changes makes data recovery all that much harder. so even if that PC were to boot up, that process alone is re-writing data to the drive.

so, remove the drive and put it into an external enclosure.
plug that enclosure into another PC and get a recovery program, like Recuva by Piriform.

in short, when you use the program and do a deep scan, you'll find that process alone takes hours and hours. I'm talking potentially in the order of at least 6 hours - depending on the drive capacity.

that will show you a list of 'files' that either can or cannot be recovered.
from the ones that can, most (if not all) will only be fragments of the original file that can be recovered.
so when done, you'll have all these weirdly named files that won't open and if they are able to be, you'll get 'this file is corrupted' messages.

SO! - it's worth trying but do not expect any success.
 
 
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