Can we recover a saved
My parents' not at all tech savvy neighbor has been working on a book about her life as a civil rights reporter for many years,
goedkope ugg, and she's close to finishing. Today, as she was working on finishing touches, (what follows is my reconstruction) she accidentally hit 'select all' and typed a character, erasing the whole document,
ugg online, and then somehow managed to save and close the document. My parents came over to try and help, but they're not too tech savvy either and I'm not sure whether they've done any good; they did discover though that Word wasn't set to save backups. (D'oh!)
This is a really really important document to my neighbor, and the most recent full version she's got is many months old and she's made a lot of changes since then.
posted by gramcracker at 12:53 PM on September 3, 2006
Yikes! She is most likely out of luck. If it was a deletion then there would be hope. but once you've written over a file, then the file system pointer has been reset to new data and the original data has been lost.
There maybe traces of it on the hard drive,
uggs sale, but then you are looking at spending big bucks for a data recovery expert and even after spending those big bucks the expert will probably not come up with anything useful. I know of no software that can be used to sweep the hard drive for random bits that start to look like traces of a word document.
Lesson learned though. Back up, back up, and do more backing up. Save new versions of a file with a new file name and save the old versions of the file just in case you need to go back and look at it. You can never backup things up enough. Sometimes it takes you a desaster like this to learn the lesson. Don't trust technology!
posted by nickerbocker at 12:57 PM on September 3, 2006
Just in case you don't know already do NOT use the computer or start up / shut down until you get some good advice here. Any disk activity may overwrite bits and pieces.
posted by chef_boyardee at 12:58 PM on September 3, 2006
In theory one could scour the unused sectors of the disk for the pieces of the file and put them back together.
It'd be a lot easier if it were a plain text file, of course. And if disks today didn't have 20 bajillion sectors. And if operating systems today weren't doing several things at once which could immediately overwrite any freed sectors.
posted by kindall at 12:59 PM on September 3, 2006
I'm probably not the person to answer this question,
ugg outlet, but I feel your pain (Word almost killed a book I had written). There are companies that can recover files that have been erased. You can find them on the web. They are expensive. You've got to give them the hard drive, of course.
Remote possibility: did she ever send an earlier version of the document to any one as an email attachment? If so, she could go back into her "sent items" folder and retreve that version of the file.
What a bummer. In theory it is possible. But Windows can't wait to overwrite free sectors with "stuff." Also, Word doesn't save plain text by default,
goedkope uggs, it saves in a binary form which makes searching those free sectors a real pain because it will all look like garbage.
posted by nickerbocker at 1:02 PM on September 3, 2006
Also, recommend to her to rename the file every day or every week.
posted by k8t at 1:03 PM on September 3, 2006
I think she's pretty much screwed. The data recovery tools available online can fix or retrieve corrupted or damaged files, but for a 'healthy' file that's been overwritten,
goedkope ugg, I don't think there's anything she can do except learn a hard lesson.
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