This post is a bit different in that I found a program that I feel many of us can use at some time. Now to the story.
I have been working at writing a report on hypnosis for about two plus weeks. Last Sunday night about midnight I was finishing my editing of this piece, and it was excellent! I was using MS Word 2003 as my writing platform. I was at the place where I had completed a very productive and inspires session and was ready to head to bed.
I hit the save button and up came all sorts of error messages and when the dust cleared what I had was a very corrupted temp file of all of my work and the original file that I had edited was gone! It was not in the recycle file, it was gone! I was frustrated to say the least. I figured the best course of action was to get some sleep and setup a mind search for a solution to my predicament.
In the morning I started by going into command line DOS to use UNDELETE. XP does not have UNDELETE. OK go to plan B. I was starting to install the electric, lighting and phone systems in a new house that morning with my electrical contracting company, so off I went to work on that. When I got back to my office I was back at finding a solution to my missing files.
I went to Google and searched file recovery. Multiple pages of offerings were presented. I started by checking out various programs. Many would take lots of time searching my drive for lost files, then present a list and then want $50 -> $75 to recover them. Then there were the ones that would attempt to recover the file and only get the corrupted unrecoverable file.
This was getting frustrating yet I knew that my file was on my drive somewhere, at least my last pre-edit file. More Google and more programs. I then got to one from SoftPerfect, Recovery, a free download. It was a relatively small file as I down loaded it. OK here we go, press open. It started with its opening page asking what drive did I want to search and what tpe of file. I entered my drive and .doc as the file type, press continue and in seconds a page of .doc files was displayed, I think it was 147. None of these were in the file tree or recycle folder, just loose and hidden on the drive.
I selected the file I felt was the best most recent before disaster and pressed recover and waited with held breath. Three, four, five seconds and there is my lost and recovered file! I immediately stored it on two different drives, don’t want to have to go through this again.
I am totally impressed with this program, it is small, fast, it works and it is free. SoftPerfect has other programs at reasonable prices, check them out. I think everyone should have their Recovery.exe in your utilities folder for when that special file goes missing, especially since MS no longer has UNDELETE available.
Be in health, physically and on your file storage.
Keith