Overwritten files

Midnyte_Ragebringer · Post by **Midnyte_Ragebringer** » March 26, 2006, 9:34 am

Anyone know a way to recover overwritten files? My Auto Repair guy overwrote his shop software and lost all of his customer/employee/inventory information since 1995. Any advice would be appreciated. I have looked over teh intarweb and come up with nothing.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 26, 2006, 10:32 am

You can often recover a lot of data with undelete utilities (norton's comes to mind), if you're talking about the normal "over-writing" case of saving a new version of the same file; since that's a write and delete operation.

Your chances of recovering anything useful are drastically reduced the longer the computer is on, the best thing he could have done would have been to hit the power button as soon as he realised what he'd done. Then you move the HD to another computer and attempt the recovery from there (so windows doesn't actually over write the recently freed space with temp files)

Ashur · Post by **Ashur** » March 26, 2006, 10:50 pm

Your auto repair guy?

Just remember to give him a written estimate of $2,000 to repair it.

Then call him mid-day and say his PC is in multiple parts, but now it'll cost $3,000.

Oh, add another $200 for that and call it an EPA fee.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » March 27, 2006, 1:57 am

http://www.undelete.com/file-recovery.asp.

It'll allow you to do a recover operation before it installs itself and once installed, catches anything that gets deleted and stores it in it's own recovery bin.

We use it at work on our production file server and it's saved me a lot of man hours since I didn't need to go to tapes to fix issues of people being stupid.