Tragedy with Revo Uninstallers

NikhilSingh25

NikhilSingh25

Forerunner
Today after 20 days I turned on my pc thinking i should work on a new video or play games.
And while going to ( D ) drive I noticed the NFS was installed in the directory instead of a seperate folder.
I wasn't playing it anymore so decided to uninstall it. Opened up Revo Uninstaller, selected NFS and hit uninstall and after 30 seconds i realised the worst mistake of my life.
Revo Uninstaller had completely formatted the ( D ) drive.
I Lost all of my premiere pro project files, Yt gameplays, Logo raw files and games I had on that drives.

I installed Tenorshare DDIG. In scan I saw the 670GB data and thought I might get it back.
So I choose the important files I needed and hours of recovery I clicked on a video to see it worked.
But not one single file worked everything was corrupted.
if you guys have any suggestions please let me know. I had already lost 1.5 year of work it's atleast worth trying everything.
 
Try photorec. It works for media files, might work for other types too. I have had positive results with an external HDD that was fully formatted. It was immediately given to me and I was able to get an almost full and clean copy of the data.

It is FOSS.
 
NikhilSingh25 said:
And while going to ( D ) drive I noticed the NFS was installed in the directory instead of a seperate folder.
Click to expand...
Unexpected, but understandable.

If you had installed it in D:/NFS, and you wanted to uninstall it completely, Revo would delete the installation folder to remove whatever remaining files were left after the traditional uninstall

But the actual install path was D:/ so it yeeted everything in there. It can't magically know which are left over game files and which are your project files right?
 
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My father used revo Uninstaller since the time is was released. But the problem you faced never happened with him in so many years of using it. You should investigate what triggered it to format the drive.
 
n1r0 said:
Unexpected, but understandable.

If you had installed it in D:/NFS, and you wanted to uninstall it completely, Revo would delete the installation folder to remove whatever remaining files were left after the traditional uninstall

But the actual install path was D:/ so it yeeted everything in there. It can't magically know which are left over game files and which are your project files right?
Click to expand...
yeah it was installed in D:/ so everything was gone after the installation.
badwhitevision said:
Try photorec. It works for media files, might work for other types too. I have had positive results with an external HDD that was fully formatted. It was immediately given to me and I was able to get an almost full and clean copy of the data.

It is FOSS.
Click to expand...
i will give it a try today. as long as I get my logo and videos I'm fine with it . Project files and games and are not a big concern.
manohar5321 said:
My father used revo Uninstaller since the time is was released. But the problem you faced never happened with him in so many years of using it. You should investigate what triggered it to format the drive.
Click to expand...
ibose said:
I don't think it is supposed to behave like that. It is either a failing disk, a virus or something else.
In any case ensure that you do not write to that drive before using any recovery software.
Click to expand...
@n1r0 got it right since the game was in D:/ revo deleted everything in D:/.
 
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Bad luck really. Hopefully you will recover some. I think i had some limited success with photorec too. But definitely make sure to mount it read only always in linux/windows.
Also for future - you need to take backups regularly. With that, only new stuff since last backup is at risk. And i always keep 2 copies of stuff in 2 hard disks.
 
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Tracer_Bullet said:
Bad luck really. Hopefully you will recover some. I think i had some limited success with photorec too. But definitely make sure to mount it read only always in linux/windows.
Also for future - you need to take backups regularly. With that, only new stuff since last backup is at risk. And i always keep 2 copies of stuff in 2 hard disks.
Click to expand...
My cabinet can only hold 1ssd+1hdd, so not much space. looking out for good SSD deals hopefully less than 4k for 1TB.
 
NikhilSingh25 said:
My cabinet can only hold 1ssd+1hdd, so not much space. looking out for good SSD deals hopefully less than 4k for 1TB.
Click to expand...
I was pretty much in the same boat for disk slots in the case. I bought a couple of internal HDDs from a member here and I'm using these pibox adapters to run them. They work pretty well, no complaints so far, been a month or so.
 
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Get a USB hard drive.
If data is pretty important I would suggest an external SSD as external HDDs die due to handling shocks sooner or later as well.

Get into a habit of connecting the external HDD weekly to your PC at least.

You can use BeyondCompare to incrementally sync the files from PC to ext HDD.

Now that you have learned the hard way I guess you will get into this habit just like I did after a 4 TB WD Red died on me. :P
 
Marcus Fenix said:
You can use BeyondCompare to incrementally sync the files from PC to ext HDD.
Click to expand...
I used to use this long ago at work. Was pretty good.
Along with data, if needed one can take backup of os too using something like macrium reflect. For this, i prefer to keep data in another partition and keep os partition simple and small.

rsync is very nice on linux too. I just use it to mirror folders to external disk. In future, maybe ill move to btrfs to avoid bitrot risk.
And timeshift is sort of quick replacement on linux for macrium reflect for os stuff only. Else clonezilla.

Marcus Fenix said:
Now that you have learned the hard way I guess you will get into this habit just like I did after a 4 TB WD Red died on me.
Click to expand...
Many of us i think learned the hard way.
 
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I think I have never done backup of Drives. The next 1tb SSD I buy will surely be used for backup purpose.
Will look into recovering the data first.
Marcus Fenix said:
Get a USB hard drive.
If data is pretty important I would suggest an external SSD as external HDDs die due to handling shocks sooner or later as well.

Get into a habit of connecting the external HDD weekly to your PC at least.

You can use BeyondCompare to incrementally sync the files from PC to ext HDD.

Now that you have learned the hard way I guess you will get into this habit just like I did after a 4 TB WD Red died on me. :p
Click to expand...
don't wanna go for external HDDs so preferably will get some internal SSD or M.2 drives if I get a good deal.
 
NikhilSingh25 said:
don't wanna go for external HDDs so preferably will get some internal SSD or M.2 drives if I get a good deal.
Click to expand...
Then any number of backups can be lost in one go, Virus / mistake / electrical issue perhaps ?
Online only backups will protect against disk failure but not other possibilities.

If ssd is cheaper naked, can look at enclosure + ssd as separate buys. Also can get ssd initially and use internally and later buy enclosure and make it external.
We get both nvme and sata enclosures. Sata enclosures will be enough too if sata ssd is cheaper, sata enclosure probably will be cheaper. Incremental updates are usually not as much as 1st time, so even hard disk speeds can be ok.
 
I tried Photrec, got about 300 pictures just some wallpapers and photos clicked from my phone. but wasn't able to recover any other media. not even the logo files.
 
NikhilSingh25 said:
I tried Photrec, got about 300 pictures just some wallpapers and photos clicked from my phone. but wasn't able to recover any other media. not even the logo files.
Click to expand...
Can try testdisk too. I dont remember, but one of them was better i think when i tried long time ago.
Or maybe look at some windows specific tool. I have tried recuva i think and it wasn't good.
 
NikhilSingh25 said:
Today after 20 days I turned on my pc thinking i should work on a new video or play games.
And while going to ( D ) drive I noticed the NFS was installed in the directory instead of a seperate folder.
I wasn't playing it anymore so decided to uninstall it. Opened up Revo Uninstaller, selected NFS and hit uninstall and after 30 seconds i realised the worst mistake of my life.
Revo Uninstaller had completely formatted the ( D ) drive.
I Lost all of my premiere pro project files, Yt gameplays, Logo raw files and games I had on that drives.

I installed Tenorshare DDIG. In scan I saw the 670GB data and thought I might get it back.
So I choose the important files I needed and hours of recovery I clicked on a video to see it worked.
But not one single file worked everything was corrupted.
if you guys have any suggestions please let me know. I had already lost 1.5 year of work it's atleast worth trying everything.
Click to expand...
What happened is not because of rivo but some infection wherein the primary motive of rivo got altered and was changed to format the drives where the selected app is installed.
Rather than doing data recovery, you should first perform a thorough scan on your c drive to rule out any virus or malware.
 
nRiTeCh said:
What happened is not because of rivo but some infection wherein the primary motive of rivo got altered and was changed to format the drives where the selected app is installed.
Click to expand...
While that is certainly possible, it makes no sense to design malware that way.

An easy way to confirm is to redownload Revo, install it after checking signature, install game directly to a small test partition, and then use Revo to uninstall it.
 
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n1r0 said:
While that is certainly possible, it makes no sense to design malware that way.
Click to expand...
Destruction is planned in this way.
n1r0 said:
An easy way to confirm is to redownload Revo, install it after checking signature, install game directly to a small test partition, and then use Revo to uninstall it.
Click to expand...
It won't work now as the system or the tools deep hive is already infected & one needs to clean its every registry key & get rid of other triggering keys elsewhere.
Also, task scheduler & hidden startup stuff which cannot be visible easily..
 
nRiTeCh said:
Destruction is planned in this way.

It won't work now as the system or the tools deep hive is already infected & one needs to clean its every registry key & get rid of other triggering keys elsewhere.
Also, task scheduler & hidden startup stuff which cannot be visible easily..
Click to expand...
I did check for viruses but there were none. and I doubt revo was infected coz I had this installed for last 5 months.
The reason was simple since the game was in D:/ it deleted everything in the drive thinking they were game files.
Recovery is the only option at the moment, photorec didn't work as expected so i need to try some other software.
 
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