Twenty Seconds In the Future with Dr. Bob Spencer

Tips and Tricks from the Good Doctor

Where oh where can my little file be?  One of the greatest stresses in life may just be that derived from deleting a file and realizing you also emptied your waste basket!  For those who remember the file "unerase" and "undelete" programs of DOS and early Windows days - take heart. They still work. You may need a utility that works well with NTFS as well as FAT and FAT32 (older storage methods), so check the file formats of your fixed disk first. A utility which I use, and which seems to work fine on Vista, is FreeUndelete, http://officerecovery.com/freeundelete/. It is free for personal use, but they would like $39 if you are going to use in a business environment and that is very reasonable. Remember, just because a file may be recovered does not mean it will be usable. If some of the space has been allocated to another file, then you may not be able to use the recovered file. The program rates files as Poor, Average or Good. The best time to undelete a file is just after erasing it, or before other files have been created or modified. The longer between a file being deleted and the recovery attempt, the less likely success will be. This utility from OfficeRecovery.com scans the designated hard drive for all files marked as deleted. You may filter the scan. It is also a good idea to recover the file to a different drive that it was originally saved on; perhaps use a USB flash drive to avoid possible naming conflicts with an existing file name, etc.