lost data

No photo today - I have a little story to tell that might be of some use to you one day - but I hope not! You will appreciate the "hope not" when you hear what I have to say.
Yesterday a member of our Visions group rang me in a panic. She and her partner have just returned home from a four month trip and it was all recorded on her little hard drive camcorder. Approximately four hours of video.
What had happened to upset this lass was that the program she used to transfer some of her video to the computer did something unusual and everything disappeared. When the camera was removed from the computer it had a spine chilling message across the screen.
"No files to be reviewed"
It looked as if the camera hard drive had been cleared completely.
Over the phone I gave instructions on how to search for the video files on the computer. No files could be found on any drive and the voice was becoming more and more frantic.
I advised finding out about data retrieval and thirty minutes later I heard back - the cost is astronomical. $150 just to leave the camera and then possibly another $500-$600 to retrieve the files - but no guarantee of success.
I told her to drive down and bring the camera and I would see what I could do. We had a Visions meeting today and if she stayed the night I would be able to give her the camera back in the morning.
While she was on her way I downloaded a couple of freeware programs for data retrieval and tried them out on my son's hard drive camera. They both worked quickly and effectively finding the same deleted files from the camera hard drive. This gave me confidence in being able to help with this problem. The program I had purchased - also from the 'net - was for memory cards and this took forever but failed to find any files. If I hear a request in the comments to this mail I will give the names of the programs I downloaded.

To cut a long story short, I was able to find the files on the camera hard drive without using either of the programs. I have no idea what has happened but I do have an inkling - the files were in a named folder and then in sub folders which seems to indicate that when the movie files were being transferred they were actually being transferred to the drive letter that was the camera and not to the drive letter on the computer.
I was able to copy the folders (one with difficulty as it kept on breaking the connection between the camera and computer) and then copy the folders onto a Passport hard drive.
We now have one very relieved holiday maker who now has video to edit.
I have had an email this evening to advise that the files were transferred without problem from the passport to the main computer. no sleepless night tonight!
AJ