Ouch! The Recycle Bin isn't used when a remote user deletes files on the local machine. My guess is that you need a file recovery utility. If the files are extremely important to you there is one best course of action to take. Shut down the computer now, take the hard drive out of that machine and install it as a slave in another Windows XP machine. Run the file recovery utility of choice from that other machine. Why do it this way? Because the data is still there on your platters, but every continuing moment of use of the computer with that drive being used as the system / boot drive means an increased likelihood that the data will be overwritten. The data locations have been freed for use by the file system, and they will be used as time goes on and more and more write operations are performed. This happens constantly on modern operating systems, even when you're not explicitly writing new user data to the drive. If the drive is formatted NTFS you may need to be particularly careful to find a utility which can work with the Master File Table and the NTFS format.
My only recent data recovery experience has been using Disk Commander from
http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/index.asp. Their FileRestore utility might work for you, and is considerably cheaper. I only had this experience because a friend called me to help her out. Disk Commander worked VERY well, and her situation was MUCH more complex than yours. And she had an ingenue (me) doing the recovery job, too!
You could also refer the matter to a data recovery service. But they will bill you big-time and may not do a better job than you can do yourself with the right tools. The big advantage these people have is the ability to access data on physically damaged drive systems and media. That's something an end user can't do because it requires many thousands of dollars of investment in equipment and specialized training.
Oh yes, the refrain from the old song is in order here, too. It's not a long song. It has one word in its lyric.
"Backups"
If your data means something to you, then you need to maintain local, remote, and removeable media backups of it. If you have a LAN, you should be able to manage all three of those safeguards. That's for future reference. For now, there's the advice I gave you in the first couple of paragraphs. I haven't lost more than a few minutes' worth of data since an incident in 1971. No, that's not a typo. Since I learned to back up my data I haven't had to
recover data on any system over which I have responsibility. I don't do recovery. In case of disaster I do restore. Much easier on me. And I like easy.
- prosaic
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