Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with undelete

Windows XP Undelete

Gusy — Mon, 25 May 2009 01:42:11 -0800

I don't understand how I could have gotten myself into such a mess, so quickly. I had specifically taken this weekend to organize a large mess of files (on my PC) that I have had for a long time. I've put hours and hours (about 30) of work into this. An hour ago I attempted to delete a file and noticed that I had made a mistake, and accidentally deleted a huge branch of my work. Up till this point, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I checked the recycle bin, nothing. Hmm, I have a habit of shift-deleting, eh. I downloaded a few free undelete apps, nothing. I downloaded more, nothing. I just deleted this a few minutes ago and it is as if it never existed. This was a huge folder with hundreds of files. It would take me longer to restore it than to do the entire weekends worth of reorganizing. I don't understand. How can it be this easy to destroy a weekends worth of work? Can you give me any tips that might save me?

I'm sorry. I'm just so angry right now. I am absolutely stunned that a single keypress could ruin so much work. Is it me, or are computers absolute shite? How could anything be designed this poorly? Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.

Help me separate the wheat from the chaff.

gregr — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 20:37:54 -0800

I use Scalpel and PhotoRec to recover deleted and corrupt files for clients. Due to the way these two pieces of software search for lost files there are lots of false positives. Is there a way to automatically test the recovered files to separate the real files from the false positives? Microsoft Office files seem to generate the most false positives (Microsoft Office files are also the files that my clients many times want back most). I can sort the Microsoft Office files by metadata, and the files that have no metadata most of the time aren't real Microsoft Office files. Are there other tools or tricks to figure out which Microsoft Office files are real?

What about methods for other file types? Are there other pieces of opensource/free software that do as good a job as Scalpel and PhotoRec at recovering files?

Undelete after a copy/paste error?

YoungAmerican — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:40:21 -0800

I lost a big file in a cut-and-paste snafu. Help! Yesterday I did an interview for my radio show, which generates a big (600+ meg) wav file. Today, I was getting ready to upload it to my FTP server so my editor can edit it. In FireFTP (FTP client for firefox), I cut the file along with another related file, and pasted them into a folder. It asked me if I wanted to overwrite the existing file (there was no existing file), so foolishly, I clicked yes. I got an error that said "error copying file" or something along those lines... and my files were gone. Not in the new folder, not in the old folder. I downloaded a file recovery program to another HD and am running it now. Is there anything else I can do? I'm using XP.

Undelete a T-Mobile voicemail?

rajbot — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:11:54 -0800

Asking for a friend: Is there a way to recover a month-old voicemail message on T-Mobile? This is on a BlackBerry.

My friend hung up without actively doing anything to the voicemail while it was playing (i.e. didn't hit 7 to delete or 9 to save), and now when she calls to check her voicemail, it is no longer there. It's an important family message.

Maybe the NSA has an archive of it somewhere?

Thanks.

What have I done??? My Pictures disappeared

snarfois — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:54:42 -0800

Somehow my friend's "My Pictures" folder (Win XP) disappeared. All 4GB of it. So a friend was showing me her holiday snaps on her laptop. Afterwards, as a favour, I removed some unwanted software: PowerDVD and My Web Search (via Add/Remove Programs) and PCFriendly (by deleting its folder in Program Files since Uninstall didn't work). Didn't restart.

I'm pretty sure that's all I did. Then, when I tried to reopen a holiday snap via the Documents menu, the shortcut was broken. And the My Pictures folder had lost its icon, and was empty. And the HDD, which had only about 300MB free before, suddenly had about 4GB free.

I immediately downloaded an UnDelete program (Recover Files 2), installing it on the D: drive. (My Pictures was on C:) It found not a trace of any of the missing image files.

Any suggestions? Sound familiar? Is this hopeless? Is there anything else I can try? (The only silver lining is that the majority of the photos were backed up, but several months' worth wasn't. The laptop is several years old, but otherwise trouble-free.)

The mp3 player ate my homework

gmarceau — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 16:37:54 -0800

My cheapo mp3 player broke the win32 file system on my flash card, and so destroyed the pictures I had stored on it. How can I recover them? Here is what I think happened.

I used the 1gig SD flash that I usually keep in my mp3 player to take some pictures, including one of the best sunset shot I ever did, looking down into the Newport Bridge. I brought the card back to the mp3 player to play some music, but when I put the card back into the camera to download the pictures to the computer, the pictures were gone.

Now, if I put the card back into the mp3 player, all sort of weirdness happens: directories with files as seen from Linux are empty as seen by the player.

I suspect the mp3 player is to blame. It is a cheap Lexar thing. The next thing I did was to make a dd backup of the file system, then run fsck, but it didn't report anything.

I've been googling for a Norton Diskedit clone for Linux, but I couldn't find anything. It would be great to go in the backup and see whether the pictures are still somewhere in there.

oops....

pompomtom — Sat, 27 May 2006 03:00:22 -0800

So I've just deleted a bunch of files which were held on an Ubuntu server, from my XP laptop, via a Samba share. Is there any way to retrieve them?

Mac OSX data recovery

Chunder — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 10:59:29 -0800

Does anyone know of a good undelete tool for Mac OS X (10.4.x) that can recover AVI files from an external (FAT32) drive? I've accidentally (obviously!) managed to delete a bundle of AVI movie files from my external data drive - prior to having it backed up, of course.
The deletion process was, in effect, a manual "move" of about 600 files from one location to another, one half at a time (due to space constraints) - an import into iTunes.

I didn't realise until I'd moved/deleted everything that the destination only included mpeg files, and that all the AVIs have become toast. Argh. Re-acquiring them is not an option, and although they're not essential to my continued existence on this planet they are something I'd like back.

Some potential issues spring to mind:
1) I suspect that there are only about 20-30 deleted files out of the 600 that are actually missing, but I have no way of finding out how many.
2) I don't know the filenames of any of them.
3) They're all in the region of 30-40 MB in size.

So far, I've had a go with FileSalvage - which although it decognises the disk, doesn't appear to do anything (I've left it scanning the 250GB drive for 48h with no further progress...)
Also, I tried Data Rescue II which scanned OK (for ages) - but when I got to the results I discovered that it wouldn't recover AVI files! Argh! (Still naively living in my Amiga bubble where the undelete program will show you everything that has been deleted and can be recovered, no questions about filetype compatibility!)
Additionally, I tried MediaRecover which contrary to my interpretation of the product description, only works for memory card type devices, not removable hard disks.
The final program I've tried is Virtual Lab - which occasionally seemed to cause a major system crash when it's run (although this may be a cruel coincidence), and in any case, does not appear to support a FAT32 formatted disk.

*sigh*

As far as I'm aware, nothing else has been written to, or removed from, the drive since the incident so my understanding is that they should all still be intact.

Has anyone else been in a similar situation, and found the perfect piece of software? I have no objection to buying something (providing the price seems reasonable) but professional data recovery services are out of the question.

There's been a couple of other similar questions, but nothing where software tools have been suggested - and, typically enough, the Apple discussion forums are currently unavailable (which they seem to be every single time I have a Mac problem and want to check there... they're probably fine for the other 99% of the time!)

Help me AskMefi - you're my only hope! ;-)

In OS X, how do I undelete the file or folder most recently put into the trash?

mrkohrea — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 00:12:45 -0800

In OS X, how do I undelete the file or folder most recently put into the trash? Once in a while, I get a little overzealous with deleting, and I want to undelete the most recently deleted file. How do I do this, either with the base os or with an additional piece of software?

OSX: Is it possible to recover something deleted from the trash?

dobbs — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 00:01:38 -0800

OSX: Is it possible to recover something that was deleted from the trash? Please.