HELP- Lost file!

Major crisis: I was working on a poster this morning in photoshop (big: 300 dpi, about 30" x45") and I sized it down to 8 1/2" x 11" (72 fps) to mess with making a smaller version of it...

and i totally messed up and closed/saved that file before saving it as something else.

So now all the work I did is gone (from the poster size... I still have it small).

Please tell someone knows how to recover that file. there is no way I'm going to be able to redo it for the poster.

Please let me know!

Thanks in advance for your help!
Sims

PS- I'm on Windows XP Service Pack 2. Dell WORKSTATION PWS650 Intel, Xeon CPU 3.06GHz, 3.25 GB of RAM

Photoshop CS2

it's gone. you can upres by resampling, but of course, you'll lose quality.

Sorry, but you've learned a painful lesson on backing up valuable work.

Bob

Oh--

One note: before I made my blunder, I "renamed" the file about an hour before. Maybe the file exist somewhere else under the other name?

I "renamed" the file about an hour before. Maybe the file exist somewhere else under the other name?

that depends on if you actually renamed it or copied it to a new file. try a search on your hard drive for the original name...

I actually renamed it in it's folder in Windows.

I tried to search for the old name and it didn't come up.

Any ideas?

Any ideas?

nope. recreate if you need to. or upres with image> image size and resamle checked.

as bob said, it's a tough lesson.

Man. Where does that data go then?

That data HAS to be somewhere on the hard drive, right? Does it just throw it away? That can't be true. It has to exist somewhere.

Things get overwritten.

That original was about 350MB – you're not going to miss that on a search!

That data HAS to be somewhere on the hard drive, right?

wrong.

Your old file MIGHT be there, but you're not going to be able to resurrect it without dedicated computer forensic software.

So, just consider it gone and get on with finding another solution.

Here's what many of us have come to learn, Sims:

• Save early, save often, make back-ups.

• You say you can't rebuild your file. I'll bet you can. Lots of us have had to do the same thing, and many will agree that often the rebuild is better, and takes less time than the first build.

Oh, thanks.

I actually got one of my friends to come over and look at it (he's a computer whiz) and he worked some voodoo on the system. He ran some programs, thouroughly searched the system and within a few hours he recovered the file.

I knew that it had to be in here somewhere. They don't just disappear.

Thanks everyone for your help, though.

You got lucky, Sims...

Usually, when something like that happens, you need to completely stop any kind of read/write operations to the hard drive where the file was located in order to have the best likelihood for recovering the trashed file.

thouroughly searched the system and within a few hours he recovered the file.

probably could have redone it faster

"probably could have redone it faster"

Nope. it was a 3-4 day job.