Movie Maker clips all gone

[hombre849]

I've been using movie maker to make sports videos for a couple years now. I had a huge collection of clips in many folders. I recently opened movie maker and all the folders and clips I've been collecting over many months have vanished. This is a nightmare and a tremedous loss of valuable data. Any ideas for recovery?

 

[Airbot]

System restore or a backup you've made?

 

[hombre849]

System restore did not work. The clips were still missing. As far as a back up, I didn't expect to lose clips from one program when the entire rest of the drive and data are intact. And now, some recent clips have gone missing, just from yesterday because I made a short JV basketball movie for Youtube. Now when I open Movie Maker, those folders have disappeared too.
I was a Beta tester for Vista during the RC1 and previous version to that and I remember Movie Maker having all sorts of bugs. But this come as a complete surprise since it has worked so well for the past year or so. Oh well.

 

[Airbot]

Well, you're short on options then. Might have something to do with the Beta you had installed. You can try a recover program and see if you can get something back. Recuva is one some people use. Have you run an Antivirus program to see if you have any malware on your system? Malware can be a possible culprit of deleting files.

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File Recovery - Home

 

[hombre849]

Oh, the Beta program is long gone. Microsoft gave me a complimentary Vista Ultimate OS for being a beta tester. So that's not the issue. But it's funny you mention the malware. I did a scan and found 2 trojan horses. Man, I can't believe those got by me. I could kick myself.

 

[Airbot]

Yeah, that might be why they've been deleted. I don't know what Av you use but Avast Home is what I use and it's pretty good. There are others AVG,Avira,etc. Some good antispyware programs are A Squared Free,Malwarebytes, Spybot, Spyware blaster,Superantispyware,Dr.Web, etc. You could just try them out and scan with different ones because some will pick up what others don't.

 

[jmartiniii1968]

Forget anything about trojans, malware, etc.....I was going through my video files to delete some of them and next thing I know it's deleting the entire "Video" folder..cancelled it but not before I lost almost all of my backed up DVD's...and ALL my Movie Maker Files, including one that is a family Christmas Present that involved about 10 hours of scanning old photographs. Did a backup restore....nothing there. Backup won't work because the video files weren't on the back up plan. Ran 2 different recovery programs...found only one of four Movie Maker Projects....others not a single trace of anywhere, not even as overwritten on the disk.

And to add insult to injury, a majority of the scans that were stored in "Pictures" and imported into Movie Maker disappeared into thin air as well.

I run virus and malware scans nightly, and system is clean.

I was reading in another forum that someone else had a similar episode of losing all of their Movie Maker files when doing a Restore....

I'm somewhat lucky in that I burned one dvd of the semi-finished copy of the Movie Maker project, but that is still a pain in the butt to import and edit......

 

[Airbot]

hi jmartiniii,

Yeah, looks like you're out of options. That's sucks. Just make regular backups every so often.