SweetPoison said:
I am never gonna find them, Tim. How can you lose something on your own F* computer?
It can only happen to me, I'm tellin ya.
You can't actually delete a file from Windows without the help of a third party program.
I will try to explain this with a somewhat inaccurate analogy:
The hard drive operates similar to a book. You have the content on the pages, but to get to the right content, you would use the index, as it tells you exactly on what page you will find a certain item. Now windows does the same, it keeps a reference list, of where each file is stored. When you "delete" a file, all windows does it remove that name from the reference list, I.e. from our books index. But the file is still there, there just isn't a convenient way to access it, after all, would you read a whole book, just to find one reference?
Anyway, this is where file recovery programs come in. A software, such as recuva (
http://www.filehippo.com/download_recuva/) does just that, it browses through each sector of the hard drive and compares it's findings with the index, if it comes across a file, which is not on the index, recuva will give you an option to restore the file. This should also work with SD cards, so just connect that one to your PC, run Recuva and then restore the images.
Something to keep in mind is, that when windows deletes the reference to a certain file, it will think that the space is free, and may just save another file right in the same spot, in which case file recovery becomes problematic. So it is always advisable to try the file recovery soon after the incident took place, especially with the ubersmart Windows Vista & 7, which run automatic defragmentation, whenever the computer is on, but not used by someone.