Stupid People Should Not Perform Recoveries !!!!

[mark_boyle2002]

At work one of my colleagues (Who must pray he never has to ask for a reference) accidentally deleted the entire contents of someones

"c:\documents and settings\Username\my documents folder."

He then performed a recovery with some sub standard piece of nonsense to, ......... Yes , you guessed it the original file location over writing any chance I had to perform a proper recovery.

Now we have 16000 files with cluster******.*** as the file names.

The extensions are incorrect as are the file names.

1. I am open to suggestion on other recovery methods for the original directory although even the mighty on-track suite doesn't see it as a deleted dir.

2. Any idea of any program that will auto associate the files correctly ?

3. Anyone prepared to kill this employee would be greatly rewarded.

[morganlefay]

You dont have a tape backup??

delete contents and restore from backup...

MLF

[RoadClosed]

winternals admin pack can restore lost clusters.

As for stupid, I have done that before and I once cloned an entire critical hard drive in reverse. Meaning I wrote over the good drive with a blank one. Live and learn.

[Aardpsymon]

last time I had to restore deleted files it was from a USB drive and went well except that the software I had could only do one file at once.

Restore this
Save it here
Restore this
Save it here
*zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

Give me a photo and £20 and I will be there though. For the good of techs everywhere :P

Most text based documents should open ok in word pad so you can at least reconstruct the contents, even in cluster sized chunks.

[nihil]

Hey Mark,

"c:\documents and settings\Username\my documents folder."

Is that a local drive?

What exactly do you do for backups?............... I am afraid that I don't quite figure your setup there?

If it is a local drive, then I would make sure that I have a secondary/slave drive of equal size or greater.

This software is what I use from time to time. You are pretty desperate to have to use it, but it works.

Basically it just looks at the drive and tries to re-assemble any file fragments that it finds, or whole files. it doesn't care about applications and operating systems as such, but there are Billy Windoze and Linux versions of it.

http://www.roadkil.net/unstopcp.html


I think that you guys need a recovery procedure documented, and invest in a couple of external HDDs perhaps?

3. Anyone prepared to kill this employee would be greatly rewarded.

I charge per kilo of body weight............... perhaps he needs a formal re-christening to "Alfredo"?

As in "Breeng me ze 'ead of Alfredo Garcia"

delete contents and restore from backup...

I think that is not what I would go for........... I would restore first to a new location and check that it worked. I guess I would have a bad feeling in general about an environment where something like this had happened.

Good luck..................

[Ignatius]

As for stupid, I have done that before and I once cloned an entire critical hard drive in reverse. Meaning I wrote over the good drive with a blank one. Live and learn.

I did the same thing - but only once. Fortunately, it wasn't so critical! Now I ALWAYS use FDISK on the receiving hard drive to delete the partitions. That way, Ghost can't do anything but copy in the correct direction.

[brokencrow]

3. Anyone prepared to kill this employee would be greatly rewarded.

Before you undertake this third step, make sure you have a biohazard-rated dumpster. OSHA & the EPA will nail you for improperly disposed of body parts.

[oofki]

for a free program you can use http://www.smartpctools.com/data_recovery/index1.html

[Moira]

Sounds like this belongs in the Dumb User thread

http://antionline.com/showthread.php?t=275215

[nihil]

Hmmmm,

Stupid is as stupid does?

Now we have 16000 files with cluster******.*** as the file names.

And nary a backup in sight