My mother in law recently got a new PC for her non-profit organization. An accountant she knows supposedly transferred the contents of the old PC to her new PC. Now she can’t find several records of checks she had on Quickbooks. My wife searched for the records on the new PC and couldn’t find them either. The accountant supposedly deleted the contents of the old PC’s hard drive so she could give it away without any of her personal information on it. I realize if he used a good program to write over the HD many times everything is irretrievable, but in case he didn’t, what’s the best way for me to go about retrieving the information she needs to have?
Your best bet would be to ask the accountant exactly how he formatted the drive.
If he used a “quick” format, which would be erasing the MFT, he only essentially ripped out the table of contents in a book.
Anything more complex, and you’re looking at a data recovery operation, which would be quite expensive.
I don’t have experience with data recovery, though, since it’s a more specialized function. YMMV 
She knows they aren’t on Quickbooks because she has paper records to compare to, rightr?
Then generally, it would be cheaper & faster to go through those paper records, find the missing ones, and re-enter them. QB has reports that list missing check numbers, which should help her locate the ones she needs to re-enter.
As already mentioned depend on how the files were erased. There are several recovery programs available including the free Recova which has recovered files for me even after a format.
http://www.recuva.com/download
I’ll see if she can contact him.
She knows because there were hundreds of checks on the Quickbooks program and now there are only a few. She said it would take her a week’s worth of work if I couldn’t recover the checks for her.
Thanks, I’ll check that one out.
Are you sure she loaded the correct Quickbooks file? You want to look for the QBW file which is the full company file. A QBB file would be a backup, and a QBX would be the “accountant’s copy.” The accountant’s copy can be created to only have records from a certain period of time.
No, I’m not sure of anything. I haven’t even seen this PC yet and I no nothing about Quickbooks. My MIL said the files were missing and my wife couldn’t find them either, but neither of them are PC wizards, so I’m guessing there’s a good possibility nothing is actually missing on the new PC. Shouldn’t the files be as easy for them to find since they knew how to find them on the old PC?