Hi there, Ok this is the sorry tale! I took a load of pictures of my nipper's school sports day on my digital camera and decided to burn them direct from the camera to a CD so she could subsequently show them to her friends on this and her friends computers. I duly plugged in the camera and dragged and dropped the files to the CD drive icon using windows explorerer. The files were duly transfered to the CD in 'shadow format' and i pressed the "write these files to CD" icon. All went well and i noticed that at the end of the burning process when prompted to press the 'finish' button on the Wizard all the shadow files automatically disappeared! Well the CD was a peach and i therefore deleted all the files from the camera. NEXT?.... Yes you guessed it, a few weeks later she lost the CD on the way to school!! So i have tried to find the files that were created on the computer during the burning process because the original camera files have gone and have discovered that they were temorarily stored in a file called "CD burning". This folder is however empty. Sadly, I have also subsequently burned 3 or 4 further CDs with lots of data for my wife's MSc studies using the same technique and the computer has been re-booted many times since the original sports day copying. My question is this?.... Do i have a hope in [bleep] of retrieving/rescueing/restoring these files? I would be prepared to pay for a specialist company to do some sort of professional retrieval as my daughter is now very sad.
Thank you in anticipation....

Sadly , yes i have! Is it true that Windows writes the copying files to exactly the same place on the hard disk (ie in this case 'CD Burning') every time. and they are continually overwritten each time you use the copying facility?

Roger that, additionally my daughter and wife spend ages on the internet, my wife for her research and the daughter Neopets!! would that affect the chance of ever getting these pics back? What are paging/swap files? i have no idea!? Is it worth asking a comercial file retrieval company to analyze the hard disk to see if they can find them and how much does such a thing cost?
Thanks for the help mate....

I am afraid your pics are lost forever.

Always, ALWAYS keep a backup of such things as personal photos or videos you have taken, such things are not replaceable.

I always keep backup DVDs  full of all the pics I have ever took, they are not to be touched except for recovery.