Hard Drive Data Retrieval Question

Toadman

New Member
Hello, I'm new on here and I'm not that computer savy. I have an old hard drive from a Compaq computer from around 2001. I want to save the pics out of it so I bought an external enclosure with power supply and cable and purchased the data retrieval software. I actually got it to work and there is a ton of "images" mixed in with the pics. These images are icons, logos and weird animated pics, probably a few thousand of them. I have a few thousand pics also since I had this computer for about 14 years before it quit. My questions is what are these strange images? Could it have something to do with a virus or something? Thanks much and please bear with my ignorance.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
It's likely assets from other programs and applications that were on the drive. Icon files, animated gifs for menus, etc. The software you used probably just pulled every single image type file and hence you got it all.

Shouldn't be anything to worry about.
 

Toadman

New Member
Thanks much for the quick reply, I won't worry about it anymore. I believe there was a place to select what types of files and since I don't know much about that I prob selected all. A lot of the pics were from old sd cards and digital cameras, etc. Are all those pics .jpg? I may scan the drive again and just select jpg and see what all comes up since there are thousands of files and it will take me forever to go through them all.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Depends on the path and where they are, if you're just copypasta-ing the entire drive like a drag and drop then you'll see a bunch of files from other installed applications that would be different than if you just moved over your specific images folders.

The only downside about a full 1:1 clone is that you also move over the other 80% of data you don't actually care about. If the filesystem on the drive is okay then you might not need the software itself, they function a little differently such as the software attempting to scan the drive for images at a binary/bit level instead of leveraging the existing file system to know where all of your data actually is on the drive.
 

Toadman

New Member
Thanks much for the info. 80% is prob an accurate amount of data that I don't want. I'll play around with it without the software and see what I can come up with. Thanks again.
 
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