arethinn | all hail saizai!

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For he hath provided me with a program that dug my sorry ass out of my file loss! It recovered everything! Everything! My 127-page long quotefile! (I thought it was longer, but it occurs to me that I had culled it a while back.) My book list, down to the one I had added shortly before my abortive attempt to upgrade to WinXP! No "w00t" could possibly express my joy right now!

*hurries to back it all up in triplicate*

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You're quite welcome.

I've had to resort to it multiple times. The stuff you mentioned doesn't do jack shit unless it's specifically prepared to, which is almost never.

FWIW, I also run Norton UnErase / Protected Recycle Bin, which means that it lies when it says it empties the recycle bin or deletes anything. And still the afterimage is there on the disk to be recovered with stuff like R-Studio.

Precaution: triple-check two things.

First, sometimes files get multiply mentioned in the FAT or equivalent. Make sure you make copies of *all* possible referents to the file in question - there may be more than one, and some might be under corrupted names. That's usually more for a fuxored HD than a simple delete, though.

Second, sometimes files get corrupted. You may want to open them and check to make sure it's all intact, or at least know what isn't. Sometimes if you find multiples you can sew them back together, or at least make cleaner cut-outs.

Oh, and there's something on my profile (end of "who am I" section) that you may want to go read.

Norton UnErase / Protected Recycle Bin

I actually keep the thing turned off, because the idea of something not actually being deleted for seven days (or whatever) annoys me. This is the only time in .. um.. several years that I went "oh shit!" because of it.

Other things: I've checked five or six of the recovered files and they all seem to be okay, and complete, the only anomaly being a conversion to all-caps from multi-case filenames. I suppose it might be foolish to assume they are *all* therefore *absolutely* okay, but I since the ones I checked were the most valuable (quotes, book spreadsheet..), if the less-valued ones turned out to be a little wonky, that doesn't bother me terribly much. As for other referents on the disk, the only such I can think of would be "recent documents" shortcuts that have long since been deleted themselves - this was a very straightforward "delete" situation.

I didn't mean obvious referents; the shortcuts would be utterly useless.

I meant *file-system* multiple referrents, which is possible if you get a corrupted FAT. This would be completely invisible to you unless you look at it in a low-level scanner like R-Studio. If all you saw in it was a normal directory structure, though - not huge numbers of random-named directories and/or files - then that probably isn't a problem.

No, it all looked quite normal.

Then you should be fine.

Are you free tomorrow ~12:15 to meet for the club orientation? (Probably ~30 min. - you, me, one of the ICC board members, and one other member of 23 whom we choose to have Signature Authority.)

If not, how's Friday (preferred time range(s)?)?