New Member, Need help with g/f's snafu!

[felts]

Hi,

I am an experienced tech support provider and I have hit a wall with a problem that I have encountered over the weekend. I was doing some work for my g/f's employer this weekend and had asked her to make sure that all the files they would need were backed up on a USB drive. She assured me that they were. We then moved an accountant's PC to a regular user's desk and proceeded to remove all of his old Excel Spreadsheets and Word documents to the Recycle Bin and then emptied it. Now this morning she calls me freaking out saying that the documents she saved on our USB drive were only shortcuts to his files and the actual files are now gone. My question is this, are there any way to restore those files? I have tried XP System Restore to no avail. I have done some searching on the net to find some answers, but I have only came up with links to download unproven software. Does anyone know of a software that can do this that I can get for relatively cheap or even free? I have never run into this problem before because I usually do ALL of my own backups and have never had an issue with having to restore deleted files. Usually all of my users are smarter than this, but I trusted someone to do something I should have done myself. Please help!

[Gecko]

Hello felts, and welcome to our forum.

You would need a recover program like , but I'm afraid it might be too late.
If you have already tried system restore then most likely the section on the hard disk that held the lost files has been over-written by the temp files that windows uses to run restore.
In fact ever time you use that system you chance over-writing the disk space used for the lost files.

If you are able to recover any of the lost files they will not be named correctly and will have to be sorted by viewing each file.
Good Luck

FYI my rule on deleting important files, always verify backups before deleting originals!

[icecube]

Hi Felts

There is still a chance that you could recover about 70 percent. The first step would be to remove the drive.

Install a file recovery program on a good system. Shut the system down and add the problem drive as a slave to the system. Run the undelete program and scan the slave. Basically all you have to do is replace the * of the first letter of the file found with a real letter. A file found will view as *ystem.txt Any letter will recover the file.

You do not want to install the software to the drive with lost software. Pardon me if that sounds too obvious, but it wouldn't be the first time I have seen someone do that. I think the progam I use to use is called Disk Mechanic here is a link to it . A lot of the free recovery stuff will only do files up to a certain size, which is kind of wasting your time.

You could try SanDisk Rescue Pro. I don't know if it will work on a hard drive, but it works good on removable media.

I had a similar situation 10 years ago when someone saved her family pictures and they were all shortcuts. Half of them were still there.

Good luck to you