Making sure all media files are positively backed up before reformatting

[mynetdude]

I recently helped someone who had some PC issues and I needed to back up all his music and photos; he had gotten some kind of malware telling him he was engaging in illegal activity and that he had to pay the FBI a "fine" of $300 blah blah blah; needless to say he was unable to access any part of his PC you couldn't hit 'esc', you couldn't use the windows command key, etc etc nothing worked couldn't exit out nor get into task manager and so I thought the best thing was to use the admin user account he had to get around those issues and that's how I accessed the files before I reformatted.

I even tried safe mode and had the same issues so I opted to use another account to do the dirty work before reformatting and that seemed to work; unfortunately not all their pictures got copied to the slave/2nd hard drive for some reason; I had done a search of .jpg .gif .png to list ALL of the possible images that were stored on their hard drive and I assumed I had gotten them all.

So the QUESTION is: how the heck can you be absolutely sure you've gotten everything? For me that's easy, I don't store my data on the same drive as the OS that makes it a ton easier; the average computer user doesn't do that and they just pile everything into one drive making it that much difficult, (only a bit of education helps make people aware of how they should store their files and stuff). I should also mention that I did get ALL of his music however

Since I'd like to know for the benefit of when I am presented with a problem like this in the future. Back in the heyday it was a little easier yet time consuming to get all the images but I didn't have to deal with "my pictures" which is why I hate using that part of windows I have my own way of storing photos, music and files.

 

[Yevrag35]

Without software?

If you're looking to backup randomly placed media files scattered all over a hard drive, you could try the "windows backup and restore" feature. That allows you to pick certain file types to backup. Or there's.....
Genie9 (Formerly Genie-soft) Free Timeline | Download Free Backup Software for Windows = which is free backup software that lets you choose the media type of file that you want to backup. It has fairly limited features though.

Obviously, there are also ones you pay for that will A) do a more thorough scan of your hard drive and/or B) provide unattended/scheduled backups.

 

[carnageX]

Just use boot off of a Linux LiveCD, browse the drive, and copy over whatever information you want backed up.

 

[mynetdude]

I have heard of using a Linux liveCD for manipulating files (copy, move, delete, etc) Linux isn't my strong points anyway...

I know there's software out there, and I don't know why I didn't think of using the built in windows backup & recovery (I guess that's my lack of trust for Microsoft windows).

paid or not is not an issue; but see the thing is I did do a search via the windows explorer search using the wildcards *.jpg and *.gif, etc and somehow we missed a ton of photos that apparently didn't copy. I recall that when it was copying at a certain point it kept saying some files already existed.

I'm going to need something that works well for collecting scattered files to bring it to one central location within a user's PC even if I have to install a 2nd HDD for them. I don't need unattended backups since this would be a one time deal for each person who presents me with this problem of theirs and if they wanted unattended backups there are quite a bit of options for that.

 

[carnageX]

Use an Ubuntu LiveCD. It's easy to use.

Home | Ubuntu

 

[Joe C]

There's an option to create an image of the pc you intend to wipe first, then back up everything and do the format. If you lost something, you can go back and re-image the drive.
If you have a second drive on hand, You can make a copy of the original drive and keep it on hand until your sure the pc owner has everything he needed off the old drive. If not then you can just pop the drive with the o.s. copy on it into the pc and get what you need. After your sure the pc owner has everything, you can wipe out that drive until the next time you need to copy an o.s.
Hard drive manufactures will offer this copy software for free or you can use several other programs that will copy the o.s. from one drive to the other.
Using an extra drive is probably more expensive, but you won't have to worry about losing anything

 

[mynetdude]

Use an Ubuntu LiveCD. It's easy to use.

Home | Ubuntu

I am also going to assume this works on a bootable USB as well?

 

[carnageX]

Yes, you can use UnetBootin to make a LiveUSB.

 

[hikaricloud]

I personally haven't tried the Ubuntu LiveCD myself, but another option I would suggest is Knoppix. It's my favorite distro to use on LiveCDs for backing up documents. It's simple, and you can do it in style.

KNOPPIX - Live Linux Filesystem On CD

 

[mynetdude]

I personally haven't tried the Ubuntu LiveCD myself, but another option I would suggest is Knoppix. It's my favorite distro to use on LiveCDs for backing up documents. It's simple, and you can do it in style.

KNOPPIX - Live Linux Filesystem On CD

Can the Knoppix run off USB instead of a CD/DVD? If I understand this right; I can have up to 2GB worth of executables installed on a 750MB CD on the liveCD? That's a lot if you ask me .