Can I Undelete That?

A friend of mine called recently in a complete panic – she had deleted two years of work and had been told by Microsoft tech support that her files could not be recovered! She was bordering on hysterical.

How do you delete two years of work, you ask? Microsoft has you set up User Profiles (whether you realized it or not) that control where information you create and save is stored, such as the My Documents folder.

Deleting the User Profile tells the Microsoft operating system to delete everything associated with that profile, including all of the documents created and saved under that profile. This is what my friend did! She deleted her profile and watched her entire work history disappear.

What to do?

Microsoft told her that the deletion was permanent and unrecoverable. But the answer was found in a cool, inexpensive piece of software called Undelete, by Executive Software.
Undelete was able to recover the majority of her files quickly and painlessly. It only cost her $50, which is a fraction of the value she placed on her files, and a fraction of what it would cost to have a hard drive recovery specialist look at her computer.

How it works:

When you normally delete a file in Windows, it temporarily goes into the Recycle Bin, giving you the opportunity to recover the file for some period of time. For all of the complaints about Microsoft, they spotted the need for the Recycle Bin pretty early!

However, once a file is removed from the Recycle Bin (when a User Profile is deleted, nothing ever makes it to the Recycle Bin…that’s probably worth fixing, eh Microsoft?), the operating system tells the hard drive that it’s ok to use the disc space for something else. THIS IS KEY: until the hard drive has some new information to put in that space, the file still really exists.

That’s where Undelete comes in:

Undelete takes a look at the space on the disc that is scheduled to be reallocated and finds the files that still exist; It then asks you which of those files you want to recover.
If you’ve added new information to your disc since you deleted the file, it may be permanently lost. The longer the amount of time that passes and the more you use your computer, the more likely that the file is gone.

Praise and Tips

My friend had nothing but good things to say about Undelete and the people at Executive Software. She said that they were very responsive, understood the severity of the situation, and followed-up with her to make sure the software worked and asked for feedback.

Other people have good things to say about Undelete as well:

Windows & .NET Magazine – Readers’ Choice Award
Windows NT Lab Mag – Editors Choice
NTools E-News – Target Choice Award Winner

My friend also had some tips on how to handle the situation:

Stop using your computer as soon as you realize you have a problem – adding information to the computer is BAD!

Stop surfing the web – you are downloading information to your computer even if you don’t realize it

Run the software from your disc drive instead of downloading it so you don’t write over the files you are trying to protect!

Keep it on hand!

At only $50 per copy, I’d say this piece of software is worth ordering now so that you have it in case of an emergency! You can get more specifics and order the product at www.undelete.com.

For more information about this article please contact mcooch@everonit.com.

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