Thanks for the pointers. It seems, though, this will be more difficult than I thought. This is a quick outline of my dilemma:
Months ago, my employer hired a consultant to evaluate our department. Since we are a design firm, we have no IT guy to backup our data. So the other designer and myself backup our data on our own external drives (company could not afford to buy for us). Anyhow, this consultant asked for us to remove company backups from our drives. No problem. I hooked up my drive and removed the company folder. As I went to disconnect, he sat down in my place and started combing through my folders. Bare in mind, I use my own personal drive so natural I have my own folders and files on it, most of which are the accumulation of years of moonlighting. In any case, he starts deleting my private folders. Tempers flare, the boss steps in between and everything goes wrong. The consultant deletes everything. The only power I had was to leave, so I packed my stuff and departed. I have a court date in the upcoming months.
In any case, I have been unwisely using the same drive for months now. I should have left it alone, but that would mean I would have to buy another, which I cannot afford right now. However, from my understanding, it seems I would have to have access to the company machine to recovery my files since that is where they were deleted, right? If so, I'm out of luck.
Really, I don't need to recover the actual files. All I need is evidence that such folders were deleted on a certain date. Like a log or something.
Anyhow, thanks for hearing me out.
Your expertise is appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan