Okay, so I’m quite the dumbass. I (used to) have a spreadsheet on which I tracked all of my finances for the whole year. I thought I had it in my My Documents folder with a shortcut on the desktop, but apparently the file itself was on the desktop. Now I’ve deleted it. I don’t know when exactly, except to say it would’ve been within the last few weeks. I asked my brother and he suggested trying to find some software that would serach my file allocation table, but I don’t know of any.
So can someone suggest some good software or a way of going backwards to find it? I’ve already run a system restore, but it apperntly doesn’t restore lost documents, only system files. I desperately need this file. Please help.
Did you empty the trash can? If not, then you can restore it. If you did empty the trash can your chances for recovery are practically nil, especially if you have credited/deleted additional documents.
Did you look in the Recycle Bin? If you dragged the file into it, but haven’t emptied it, it will still be there. I can’t vouch for this particular software, but this seems like it might work for you. However, note that the longer you go before trying recovery efforts, the greater the likelihood that you’ve overwritten at least some of the space the file originally occupied. Another thing to look into: your spreadsheet program might automatically make a backup copy any time you make changes to a spreadsheet. MS Excel (and the other Office components) usually do this by default by changing the first two characters of the the filename to ~$. You might be able to find the next most recent version of the original file that way.
Not true, I regularly recover documents, I have even pulled intact files from drives that have been repartitioned, reformatted, and had windows reinstalled on them. In one case I asked about on the dope I had a drive that read as an EISA partition to windows (pronounced HOSED), this thing recovered 11 gigs of pictures and music off of that drive.
My favorite tool so far has been this I bought the pro version to be in licence compliance for my shop. Works like a dream and has been simple to use.
Okay, so I downloaded this program and bought a personal license to try it out. It can find the file, but when I recover it, it comes out in all kinds of goobledegook. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
The file just may be trashed or not properly associated. Since you know what kind of file it is, you could try doing things like making a few copies of the recovered file and opening it in notepad, renaming it to .csv or things like that to see if different approaches to the file result in a more recognizable file.
Also if you install the software to the same drive as the data is in you may well have overwritten part of the file you wanted with the software. File recovery work is best performed by mounting/connecting the drive to another machine with a functioning OS so as not to further disrupt potentially recoverable data.