undelete deleted archive
I am not a newbie, but you'd never believe it by the not one, but two stupid things I did. I will spare you all that, but I am trying to find a way to undelete and prior archive that I sadly deleted. The deleted archive is located on an external disk, formatted in NTSF, and the OS is Win XP, SP3. My Acronis version is Home version 11. Nothing has been written to the external disk since I created the problem.
I tried to use OfficeRecovery's FreeUndelete, but it creates a file (on the C: drive) that is unreadable by Acronis.
Any suggestions as to a program that works? I presume that we are just resetting a bit, but...
Thanks for any rational input.
Chuck
The news is not good.
In dos days it was easier to recover a deleted file; if you hadn't written to the disk, then all the sectors would still be exactly as they werebefore the file was deleted and you had only to change the "deleted/notdeleted" attribute in the first marker in the file table entry for the file. An undelete program didn't have to be very intelligient -- it jsut had to find and mark the one entry.
The later more complicated OSes make the problem more difficult, even data disks get written to often by the system and sectors that are no longer marked as in use can quickly become used. If you recover a text file, anything you recover is probably usable text--although some sentences might be incomplete. With a file like a program execution file or a TIB, if you recover it from deletion, if any part is missing or out of sequence (even one bit), then the file is not going to be usable. A tib would be invalid under ATI, probably won't work in ATI and slightly less probably might not be explorable in windows explorer. Making matters worse, tibs are often so large that they exceed the wastebasket and therefore the sectors used by the file are freed up for use virtually immediately.
The file you recovered that ATI can't read -- you might be able to explore it and copy out (some of) data files. If so, do that and then if you have an older backup, restpre the older backup then copy back the newer data files onto the restored disk.
Alas, one must keep many backups and in more than one place.
Ilya,
I read the "top 10 free...." article and many look good. I want to be able to recover entire folders with one step. That is, mark the folders that are deleted, or that have deleted files in them, and then say recover and then I will supply the destination. Do you know which one will do that?
Cliff
none of the 10 works on big files, did you find your solution yet? please share with me.
If you want to be able to recover files, make a backup of them -- the frequency should be determined by how much data you can afford lose. Undeleting is a terrible and almost always fruitless chore, even in DOS days. Undelete was a nice trick Peter Norton popularized back when files were small and sectors not quickly overwritten. But even then it was of use only on small files that had been just deleted. For anything else you wanted to have a backup so you could just open the backup and grab the last version of the file.
If you are willing to try professional services, which cost, you could always try Drive Savers. I've used them in the past before and they are great, but costly.
And as it was asked in the past, no, I don't work for them, I don't have any stock in them, or anything else. I recommend them as they are the leading company for this market. If they go out of business, I will lose nothing, not even sleep.
Try the web site datarecoverynj.com. Choose the "how it works" tab and scroll to the very bottom. There you will find the phone number and email address so you can ask questions.
Consider the cost before signing up with a data recovery firm. Ime, the results are rarely satisfactory for the user/client.