What to do if accidentally deleted presets?
3Diva
Posts: 12,010
Is there a way to restore presets one has accidentally deleted? I was working on some shaders over the past few days (got 36 of them done) and JUST accidentally deleted them. They aren't in my "trash bin". Is there a way to restore them?
PLEASE tell me there is.
(EDIT: I tried the suggestions here as well as several others I discovered via Google, and none worked. Thank you all for the suggestions, though. I appreciate the community for caring enough to want to help. I've just learned a valuable lesson about making sure to close down and restart Daz Studio regularly, making backups of my work, and not working when overly tired. Now back to the "fun" task of trying to recreate what I've already done. lol)
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There are file undelete programs around that scan your disk and can restore files that have been deleted. It is best to do the scan soon, as any new files you create on the same disc could overwrite those deleted ones.
Google for "Recover Deleted Files"
Thank you, @Havos . It looks like that won't work in my case, since I had just saved fresh copies of the shaders a few minutes before accidentally deleting them (might be why they aren't showing up in the recycle bin, too I guess). This is awful. I'm so mad at myself. I've never deleted files on accident before. This is hugely frustrating knowing I have lost a couple of days of work and have to start over. :( That will teach me to try and work on such little sleep.
_ And files could well be Recovered _
Recycle Bin _ Make sure this is NOT selected ( see image)
What exactly did you delete? Files in Windows? Or content thumbnails in the DAZ studio content library? At least in DS 4.8 If you deleted something out of Categories in the DAZ studio content library, the underlying file is still wherever it is, you just need to select "scan known directories for files" to make them reappear in the Unassigned category. (Not sure how it works if you delete something out of the "DAZ Studio Formats" or "Poser Formats" folders though.)
_ _ A freah save IS more likely to be Recovered _ and Recycle Bin , ought to be there _which Depends on settings _
Recuva is what I use
I don't think the settings for the recycle bin are relevant when files are deleted by apps other than standard windows ones (eg the Windows Explorer). I am fairly sure that files removed by Daz Studio will not be put in the recycle bin regardless of the system settings.
However even when deleted by DS these files may still be on the disk, and possibily can be recovered, as I mentioned in my earlier post, and the earlier you act after the deletion, the better.
_ also
Right-click on the folder that contained the permanently deleted file(s) or folder(s)
Choose 'Restore previous versions.'
From the available versions, choose the one dated when files were there.
Click 'Restore' or drag & drop the desired version at any location on the system
other apps does put files in recycle bin, so is relevant _ in some way i.e. Check all possibles
Thank you all for the suggestions. I did try all those though. I'm not sure why the Daz Studio preset files where unrecoverable. It seems like sometimes DS doesn't finalize presets until the program is shut down? I could be wrong on that. In any case, this was a teachable moment for me and I'll be shutting down and restarting DS regularly as well as being much more careful about not working when I'm overly tired.
_ and the 'Restore previous versions.' also ??
and you're quite welcome_
Yeah. This happened 12+ hours ago so I've tried quite a few different things since originally posting. I Googled how to restore deleted files and there where quite a few suggestions, I was just desperate enough to try most of them. lol A couple suspicious methods I opped to pass on though.
Thank you guys for the suggestions and for caring enough to try and help. I've just learned a hard learned lesson - and if I look at it like that I don't want to bash my head against the keyboard. lol :P
Presets are not cached, they are written when you save. Unfortuanbtely, as others have said, as far as I ama ware deleting within DS (which I assume is what you mean) does not place the file in the Trash Can/Recycle BIn.
IMHO that is one action that could really use one of those "are you sure you want to do that" popups.
That would be a cool thing for them to add in the future, the Daz Studio files going into the trash bin - for safety reasons. :) Or as Catherine3678ab suggested, maybe a pop-up asking if we're sure we want to delete them.
Edit - Oh, I guess it does give a prompt asking if you want to delete them. Weird. Maybe I just hit yes on reflex. It's good to know there is a prompt.
But... there already is a Delete File confirmation dialog.
Yup. I THINK what probably happened is that I had intended to delete one preset but I had them ALL selected since I had just got done doing a batch render of all the icons via the Map Master Pro product. So thinking I was just deleting one, I had deleted all the presets, forgetting I had them all selected to do the batch rendering. I'm pretty sure that must have been what happened, I'm not completely sure since I was so tired at the time and hadn't gotten much sleep over the previous couple days.
It's a pain in the bottom and a stupid mistake. Hopefully, now I'll remember to make backups more frequently so that something like that won't happen again.
Sometimes, someplaces, I recall deleting items intentionally {in the Content Panel} and no confirmation dialog appeared.
............
Just rechecked that, and you're right, it does show up now, good :-)
Deleting from the scene in the viewport is all too easy to do accidentally, but at least that is covered by undo.
This is probably to late, meaning you may have already written new data to the locations where the data was (though the data could possibly still be recovered). EaseUS has a data recovery tool that will easily restore deleted files (deleting a file just removes the pointers to the file, the data still remains on the disk, it's just the file system doesn't know it's there anymore). Actually there are several utilities like this from other vendors, but I have used the tool from EaseUS several times in the past to recover data off of damaged and reformatted disks (i.e. "no data" on the disks). These are awesome tools to have when you do something stupid, or someone else does.
Thank you for the recommendation, DustRider. :) Having a reliable program to help recover files might be a good idea.
You're more than welcome
Really handy when you install a new hard drive, then format the wrong one!! Yep, I did that about a year ago (don't do important things at 10:30 at night). I formatted my data drive that had a lot of important work data. Made me mad because it was going to cost me more to get the software to recover the data, but I needed to update it anyway. About 24 hours later I had everything back to normal. Actually better than normal, because I had the drive configuration I wanted, but didn't want to take the extra time to transfer the data, until I was "forced".
It's also really nice if you have a USB drive that decides it can't be read any more. I had one that all the data went missing right after I had picked it up from the contractor ($10,000 worth of data). They still had a copy of the data, but they were almost 200 miles away, and of course I was in a time crunch. The EaseUS data recovery tool worked like a charm to "recover" all the data (for some reason the file allocation table got trashed). I've also used it to read data from un-mountable dying drives. Usually if the drive will spin up, you can get most or all of the data off of it.