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  • Emergency file recover… or not as the case may be…

    Posted by David Rogers on 13 December 2006 at 16:23

    Ach! *(&*("$£!! (*$£(* !!

    Was cleaning up my file store & getting shot of all the .BAK files Signlab creates and made a GIANT whoopsie. 😳

    Went and grabbed every file, CDL & BAK that began with a number, A or B. Luckily I am usually good at filing them correctly under job references (CSxxxx) so didn’t lose too many…about 14 files – 2 or 3 of which are needed – kept them filed under customer name only for easy finding…

    Deleted them off the Win 2000 server, and as Windows no longer has it’s own undeletion tools in DOS (WELL DONE THERE MICROSHAFT) I got back 2 of the rubbish ones with a demo of something from Tucows…64K max.

    Went to the archives for the older stuff – only to find out that the last backup must have been ‘user interupted’ by a helpful member of staff and it’s saved….an empty folder.

    Almost laughing….

    gonna trawl the other backups & see if I’ve got at least something…otherwise artwork regeneration time when a certain customer comes in….Ach! bugger &^"£*($!! *$"7!

    Anybody got a source for a reliable fully working program that doesn’t cost the earth?

    Dave 👿 live ‘n’ learn.. (sigh)

    David Rogers replied 18 years, 10 months ago 4 Members · 8 Replies
  • 8 Replies
  • David Rowland

    Member
    13 December 2006 at 18:11

    Hi
    I have a license to this
    http://www.active-undelete.com/

    It has two scans, the deeper one works well.. u know the score, dont use the harddrive until you have recovery or the files will get overwritten with tmp stuff.

    Demo is free, if it shows the file.. pay $39 then scan again and recover.

  • David Rogers

    Member
    13 December 2006 at 19:55

    Aha, that was one I had the demo of. Seems to find a fair amount of the files.

    Cheers – nice to have a recommendation!

    Dave

  • Phill Fenton

    Member
    13 December 2006 at 20:01

    I hope you get it sorted Dave. Nothing worse than losing a whole load of customers files 😥

  • Alan Wharton

    Member
    13 December 2006 at 22:25

    do you have a antivirus on the server, on norton even if you delete a file you can still recover it using norton, pain in the a tho, iv just had my main 80gig hd crash today so im in similar boat but i have 2nd hd as a mirror in pc so hopefully the auto backup should of sorted mine i hope 😳

  • David Rogers

    Member
    13 December 2006 at 22:56

    Ended up getting ‘SmartUndelete’ – tried it out on the home PC – filppin’ heck! – these things even work on stuff that’s been deleted & defragment run a couple of times….so feeling hopeful that I may recover at least the files I really wanted…so long as nothings been written over them.

    ps. We don’t run Norton (I hate the lumbering dinosaur!), use Sophos instead across the network & stand-alones for work, and run Zonelabs anti-virus at home…no probs in two years.

    Dave

  • David Rogers

    Member
    14 December 2006 at 09:24

    Well – got onto it first thing this morning. Recovered most the files…none useable, got a few of the thumbnails though – so at least reminder of what WAS there…. 🙄

    That, I suppose is the trouble with working on a shared server… 10 PC’s reading & writing data all day – pretty much not stop. It’s not like I could halt work for the entire office & factory! Well, I could…but better have a good explanation!

    So literally back to the drawing board on some of these files. 6 liveries…one for a repeat..but have other versions of it stored. A couple of unfiled van layouts for the last few days – gone, but took photos of them (whew!) and other misc stuff for inter-company signs – no big deal.

    The killer is a menu I typed for a chinese takeaway – took hours getting the layout just right – for reprinting every time the update their prices….

    And I’m usually so careful!! 😉 😳
    😛 LOL

  • David Rowland

    Member
    14 December 2006 at 10:03

    yep.. indeed… the delete method is normally to rename the first letter of the filename to something it skips, then the file is gone (or not).

    We lost a file recently… then later on that day corel corrupted a file and the backups were poor… i do use the volume shadow function of small business server 2003/windows 2003, it copies the files and gives you a way of going back by going to properties of a file and then choosing the "previous files" option. Its okay, but not perfect answer.

  • David Rogers

    Member
    14 December 2006 at 10:24

    I was just peeved ‘cos I normally do server backups about once a week (or when I can be bothered)…and have at least three archived versions. Last week I cleared out the old bumf (yeh..I know…) & left it doing a full backup – about 30Gb, annoyingly it always stops when it hits my files with a continue / cancel button. "Just hit continue if I’m not around" is what I tell ‘anybody’… looks like a ‘somebody’ hit cancel and I ended up with an empty folder…. 😳 Whoops!

    Lesson learnt though…maybe.

    Suppose that’s what I get for taking off the ‘delete confirm’ to speed up day to day stuff. Dumbass! 😛

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