Hastur, is there some sort of average time limit that Norton’s Unerase feature has, or is it strictly a matter of luck, whether or not the previously-used sectors on the HDD get used or not?
Just asking because I’ve had important shit deleted in the past… most of it intentionally (damn petty family… grr!).
The longer you go without trying to unerase it, the less chance you will be able to. I unerased an entire directory last week that I accidentally deleted. I love Norton. As much as you can love software.
OK first let me say that I have no idea what AOL is like or what services it provides, (I am apparently outside their current coverage area). So all suggestions given here are strictly general solutions to avoiding the problem in future.
Email:
Use a dual or triplicate account system with multiple server addresses; hotmail.com and zfree.co.nz both offer free email services. Create a new account on such a service and then forward all important emails you receive/send to it.
Files:
Attach all files into an email and post them to said addresses.
Favourites General URL addresses:
Create a file and paste the addresses into it, then mail it off.
AOL addresses:
Sorry I have no idea what these are or how they work 
Passwords:
Hmm writing down passwords is bad.
I suggest you use things like a favourite play quote
i.e. HamletSIAI
This will give you
[ul]
[li]One or two redundant backups on separate servers[/li][li]Access to the information in a format that can readily be transferred to your local machine if required[/li][li]No recorded passwords[/li][/ul]
Note:
Recovery is unlikely however if the service call is free try ringing in the middle of the night you may strike a technician who knows what they are doing and is bored.
As stated in a previous post most free mail services have a limit on how much you can store on them so you will have to check this every so often and either delete old/redundant stuff or download it to your personal machine.
Email may b recoverable from the recipients/senders, if you ask them they may be able to send you the emails in question.
Hope this helps
Britt
(I been there before)
Not so fast, Welfling!
Before giving up, try opening the file with a text editor like BBEdit or WordPad and see if it can pry loose information that AOL itself is no longer able to see. Chances are good that the file and its data have not been deleted, merely corrupted in such a way that AOL can no longer interpret it (e.g., a file header that serves as a ‘Table of Contents’ to AOL may have a couple of garbled characters in it which AOL interprets as ‘first entry begins on line negative 226 billion’ and dutifully displays what it finds on that line)
Welfy says she is interested in pursuing the above suggestion but needs to know which file is the one containing Personal Filing Cabinet and Faves and all that stuff. I am not on a PC and I seem to recall that the filenames used by WAOL is different than the ones used by the Mac version. Would one of you Windows users of AOL be so kind as to identify which file is the one she should go after?
Depending on the version of AOL that Welf is using, the folders/files may have different names. In general, however, on the C drive should be a folder beginning *AOL~~~~*. (It might be AOL50 for AOL 5.0, for example.)
In that folder, should be another folder labeled Organize. Opening that, there will be one file for each username registered to AOL through that computer.
Open the file using WordPad or something similar.
When I went up from AOL 3.0 to AOL 4.0 I made sure that my username folder was backed up. I have never been able to integrate the 3.0 data into the 4.0 file (which is one reason that I have not yet upgraded from 4.0).
Digging e-mails out is difficult, but it can be done, one e-mail at a time. I have never even found my old “favorites” stuff.
One warning: If Welf re-installed AOL after the data was lost, the AOL techs could be correct because the install would overlay the old same-named folders/files. Whether that data could be found using the various search-and-recovery software (if the old stuff happened to have been written on different sectors than the new stuff) is outside my ken.
Once you find some candidate files, you might want to try a utility called “strings” that takes any file and extracts all the ascii text from it. If you found a big file with all the AOL mail in it, in some wacky AOL proprietary binary format, this utility would probably be able to extract the email text from the file (unless it was encrypted). The strings output is just all the extract text run together, so the result would be pretty raw, but at least the text would be there.
You can probably find the strings utility with a google search on “strings.exe”. It’s a command-line utility, so you’ll have to play with it in DOS.
Arjuna34