Oops, I've lost an image....possible to retrieve it???

I'm afraid it's a goner for good but it doesn't hurt to ask.... Is
there any way to retrieve an image which suddenly has disappeared? I
did not deliberately delete it. I had intended to print it and then
realized that I had the wrong paper in the printer, was in a hurry
anyway because I was supposed to be heading out the door to the
doctor, so hit the cancel button for the print and everything went
away.... I didn't realize until later this evening when I came back
ot the computer to try another crack at it that anything was wrong
until I looked for the image and didn't find it in the appropriate
folder. Oops.... again this is an instance where I had not made a
backup earlier. GRRRRRR!!!!!

I thought about trying a "System Restore" (I have WIN XP Pro) but
looked in Google and found something that said that this only is
useful for correcting certain functional things and clearing out
screwups made by viruses and such, that it wouldn't restore data. ??
I then found a site online where I could download a free program to
see if it would find the file for me and then I would have to pay to
go ahead and utilize the full program in order to actually restore the
file. No joy there.... nothing showed up.

Does anyone have any suggestions or am I screwed? This makes me SO
MAD because it was a terrific image: two ducks coming in for a landing
on the water, one which had actually just hit the water and the other
one suspended in air above him, feet dangling, positioned to land....
I can't believe I messed up with this, of all images!

--Connie

 

Thanks, all! It is 5:00 AM but I'm a happy camper. I had checked the Recyle bin straightaway and it wasn't in there, and in fact nothing was.... I got on Google again and found a data recovery program for a reasonable price that sounded like it would do the trick -- and lo and behold, it did! Unfortunately it took quite a while to do a "deep scan," but in the end it was worth it, as sure enough the image was there....

The folder this was in is one that I'd only just briefly looked through but hadn't yet taken the time to do a backup to CD or anything before actually beginning to work on the images. I just remembered this one image and thought it would be interesting to print it out to take with me to show friends, as I was in the midst of printing out some other pictures for them. I don't know what I was thinking, just messing with something like that when I was distracted and when I hadn't taken precautions to protect the image by first making a copy, etc....

To be honest, I still don't know exactly what happened -- I agree that it seems odd that cancelling the print job would've screwed everything up and deleted the file. I've cancelled print jobs in the past, too, and never had anything strange like this happen. Something sure did. Well, whatever, at least I've retrieved the image!

Thank you for your responses!

Lesson learned here....before I do ANYTHING else to that particular image or the other images that are in that folder, I'll be burning the backup CD....

Also I need to explore some sort of external hard drive to use as an additional backup system....