A coworker(yeah, likely story) just deleted some files and emptied his trashcan. He’s wondering if he can get them back, now. I told him I didn’t think so. I know there are some programs that allow you to do this assuming they were loaded in the first place. I checked his machine and nothing like that is there. So, is he SOL?
I don’t know abou the PC world, but in the Mac world, Norton Disk Doctor can recover files.
If we are talking about Windows, he can get the files back. Windows doesn’t actually delete the files it just deletes the fact that they are there in the file allocation table and then they will over time be written on top of by other files. So he should do this soon.
Try this:
I have used this program and it works ok. There are other programs as well that do the same thing. This one lets you download an eval though. I think the eval is limited to 5 recoveries, after that you either have to hack the registry to find the flag that limits the recoveries or buy the product.
If this isn’t Windows I have no idea if you, er I mean he, can recover the files.
Forgot to add. This is Windows 98. Norton Disk Doctor can do this for PCs as well, but he doesn’t have it. Thanks though.
Thanks for the link retsin. It doesn’t look like it works for Excel files, though. Any other ideas?
What makes you think it won’t work for Excel files? It should work for all files. Did you give it a try?
Yes. The files came up listed as XLS, but showed nothing but garbage when we pulled them up in Excel. It could be that they’re just corrupted, but if I could find another program to try as well, I’ll know for sure.
Yeah, I think there are better programs than this one out there, but I knew this one had a free eval. It isn’t failing because it is an Excel file, but rather because it was likely either fragmented too much for this program or because the deleted file has been overwritten partly. It should have warned you to save the files to another drive, or at least to another directory. I hope you did this. This can prevent further corruption.
Be careful! Do not delete the corrupt files that you just got from the restore without renaming them first! Otherwise you may end up restoring the corrupt versions with the other software.
Good luck.
We did restore them to a different directory, but it still didn’t work. It’s very likely that the files just flat out corrupted, but I’m looking for another program just in case.
Well, you have to restore them without messing around or they could be overwritten. As has been said Norton or other utils can do it but in WIN98 to undelete a file after deleting it from the recycling bin:
- Shut down and restart in DOS mode
- Navigate to the folder where the file used to be
- type <lock C:> and after warning <y> <enter>
- type <undelete> <enter>
- check file has been restored
- type <unlock C:>
- type <exit> to return to windows
maybe this will not help you if it’s too late but it may help next time.