Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Recovering a deleted log

A friend of mine called me yesterday in a panic. He had bought a copy of Windows 7 and in his haste to install it he had forgotten to ensure that all his important files were backed up. Now Windows 7 was running but the data file for his logging program containing details of all his contacts over several years had gone!

I pointed him towards Tech-Pro.net's article on how to recover deleted files. I had an email this morning to say that a trial version of Uneraser had found the missing log file apparently intact. Huge sighs of relief all round! When a file has been deleted, good recovery software will usually restore it, but when a new operating system has been installed on the hard drive a lot of data will have been irretrievably overwritten and all bets are off.

2 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

That's why I always make a backup of my logbook. One on a USB stick and one on a external server. I can understand that he was very happy. 73, Paul PC4T

Unknown said...

Yes, I always back up as well. KComm has a backup facility built into it which copies the log to another drive or FTP server (in fact I back it up to this web server, and the online contact log is generated from the backup copy.)