The day all the files disappeared
I had left my mail open and went to do some other things. When I came back there was an error message saying that the mail file would not open. No problem - as that's usually a network failure. I looked at some files on the server to check the connection in general and they weren't there.
*Sharp intake of breath*
No files. Not a sausage.
This clearly couldn't be true so the next thing I did was turn everything off and on again in case I was somehow stuck with an old or partial view of things. It's often worth trying, but no dice. The files were still missing.
Never mind we have backups (using a program called Genie). I looked at where the files are stored and to my horror say the most recent file was 6 months ago. For some reason the backup schedule had quietly failed and we had not noticed. A lesson there - check your backups periodically even if you think they are working.
At this point mild panic set it. But we computer experts and made of sterner stuff.
You have all your files missing and a viable old backup. Pop quiz - what do you do? If you think the answer is to install from the old backup you got the answer wrong. When files go missing it is because they have been marked for deletion. I say marked because what happens is that Windows just makes the space available for programs to reuse. It does not actually securely delete anything. So that... The very worst thing you can do to a location where files just vanished is copy something onto it such as reinstalling a poor/aged backup. That would write to the disk where your files are still lying hidden and potentially scribble data all over them because they look like empty space.
No - the answer is that your backup set isn't going to go away. You can try that option any time as a nuclear last resort. What you need to try first is undeleting the files that mysterious vanished. To do this you need an undeleter or uneraser.
Where do these come from? In general its best to try either a cover disk or a download site because those places have editors who will delete anything that is proving a worse cure than the problem. We went to http://www.download.com andhad a look. Searching for undelete or alternatively unerase will find you some options. If you are wise the next thing you will do is read the user opinions of these downloads. Some unerasers will only handle a few files, some only show you what they could allegedly undelete if you paid for them and some only recover files below a certain size.
We tried a few on sample files that I deliberately created in word and excel and then deleted. They failed to recover the data despite being able to see it. So we didn't go for them.
I then tried O&O disk recovery which we had a copy of from a cover disk. It recovered everything but named it the same... FILE00001.XLS FILE00002.XLS etc. When I opened these I found they were indeed our lost Excel files (hoorah). But there were so many of them and also some broken ones that were from way back and only part recovered. We decided that the problem was the tool was simply too powerful. We wer clearly using something that ignored what it knew of file names and crawled the whole disk in fine detail looking for anything that might be of a known type. In short it looked an outstanding tool for utter distaster recovery but was inappropriate for a simple case of accidental deletion.
We then looked round O&O's site and found their uneraser. The fact that disk recovery tool had worked (and we also know of their market leading defrag tool) now gave us confidence. Uneraser is one of those tools whose demonstration mode is to show you what it could unerase if it wanted to. We ran it on our damaged server and it immediately identified and named the missing files. ...Pretty encouraging.
So wallet in hand we bit the bullet registered the thing and received the license key. Of course if your mail went with the server you will have to use a hotmail account or something, as we did, to retrieve the key. Don't buy an uneraser on line and have the key sent to your broken mail account. ...That would just be dumb :-)
Ran it again and unerased to a completely different hard disk. This is one important step! Never unerase to the same disk as the one with deleted files on it if you can help it. It's worth sticking in a drive from an old PC or taking your hard disk round a mates - anything other than writing files onto the very space you are trying to retrieve. We were lucky. Being a server it genuinely had two large disks and we unerased from one to the other.
Bingo! all our files came back. So chalk one up to O&O. To say it was painless, once we had headed in this directionis an understatement. It found andput back a whole tree of over 1.6 GB from a single command directed at the root of those files.
Later when we put the files back inplace and started using things we found the main mailboxes were missing and had not unerased. I presume because they were in progress when the crash occured and did not have the same "simply deleted" status. :-(
We are going to have a go with O&O disk recovery and see if we can pull those files back from the disk now using its heavier capabilities. ...But that's another story and another tool for another day. Worst case we can use that old backup I was talking about to fill in the missing files, bar recent mails.
John
http://www.vivamex.co.uk
IT Recruitment by IT People
*Sharp intake of breath*
No files. Not a sausage.
This clearly couldn't be true so the next thing I did was turn everything off and on again in case I was somehow stuck with an old or partial view of things. It's often worth trying, but no dice. The files were still missing.
Never mind we have backups (using a program called Genie). I looked at where the files are stored and to my horror say the most recent file was 6 months ago. For some reason the backup schedule had quietly failed and we had not noticed. A lesson there - check your backups periodically even if you think they are working.
At this point mild panic set it. But we computer experts and made of sterner stuff.
You have all your files missing and a viable old backup. Pop quiz - what do you do? If you think the answer is to install from the old backup you got the answer wrong. When files go missing it is because they have been marked for deletion. I say marked because what happens is that Windows just makes the space available for programs to reuse. It does not actually securely delete anything. So that... The very worst thing you can do to a location where files just vanished is copy something onto it such as reinstalling a poor/aged backup. That would write to the disk where your files are still lying hidden and potentially scribble data all over them because they look like empty space.
No - the answer is that your backup set isn't going to go away. You can try that option any time as a nuclear last resort. What you need to try first is undeleting the files that mysterious vanished. To do this you need an undeleter or uneraser.
Where do these come from? In general its best to try either a cover disk or a download site because those places have editors who will delete anything that is proving a worse cure than the problem. We went to http://www.download.com andhad a look. Searching for undelete or alternatively unerase will find you some options. If you are wise the next thing you will do is read the user opinions of these downloads. Some unerasers will only handle a few files, some only show you what they could allegedly undelete if you paid for them and some only recover files below a certain size.
We tried a few on sample files that I deliberately created in word and excel and then deleted. They failed to recover the data despite being able to see it. So we didn't go for them.
I then tried O&O disk recovery which we had a copy of from a cover disk. It recovered everything but named it the same... FILE00001.XLS FILE00002.XLS etc. When I opened these I found they were indeed our lost Excel files (hoorah). But there were so many of them and also some broken ones that were from way back and only part recovered. We decided that the problem was the tool was simply too powerful. We wer clearly using something that ignored what it knew of file names and crawled the whole disk in fine detail looking for anything that might be of a known type. In short it looked an outstanding tool for utter distaster recovery but was inappropriate for a simple case of accidental deletion.
We then looked round O&O's site and found their uneraser. The fact that disk recovery tool had worked (and we also know of their market leading defrag tool) now gave us confidence. Uneraser is one of those tools whose demonstration mode is to show you what it could unerase if it wanted to. We ran it on our damaged server and it immediately identified and named the missing files. ...Pretty encouraging.
So wallet in hand we bit the bullet registered the thing and received the license key. Of course if your mail went with the server you will have to use a hotmail account or something, as we did, to retrieve the key. Don't buy an uneraser on line and have the key sent to your broken mail account. ...That would just be dumb :-)
Ran it again and unerased to a completely different hard disk. This is one important step! Never unerase to the same disk as the one with deleted files on it if you can help it. It's worth sticking in a drive from an old PC or taking your hard disk round a mates - anything other than writing files onto the very space you are trying to retrieve. We were lucky. Being a server it genuinely had two large disks and we unerased from one to the other.
Bingo! all our files came back. So chalk one up to O&O. To say it was painless, once we had headed in this directionis an understatement. It found andput back a whole tree of over 1.6 GB from a single command directed at the root of those files.
Later when we put the files back inplace and started using things we found the main mailboxes were missing and had not unerased. I presume because they were in progress when the crash occured and did not have the same "simply deleted" status. :-(
We are going to have a go with O&O disk recovery and see if we can pull those files back from the disk now using its heavier capabilities. ...But that's another story and another tool for another day. Worst case we can use that old backup I was talking about to fill in the missing files, bar recent mails.
John
http://www.vivamex.co.uk
IT Recruitment by IT People
posted by Vivamex at 3:46 AM
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