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  • From: Mark Turner <markt AT siteseers.net>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Deleted Files -- Please Help If You Can
  • Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2007 20:54:56 -0500

Colleen,

The way filesystems work, files are divided into pieces and scattered around your drive. When you delete a file, the list of pieces gets deleted and the spaces containing the pieces are marked as free. The pieces themselves are not deleted. Thus its possible to recover deleted files if you do so before the computer overwrites the pieces it thinks are now available space.

There are many commercial and freeware utilities (Norton Utilities, for instance) that can easily reassemble your files. It's not always perfect and sometimes a bit tedious but it can save you plenty of time compared to recreating your lost work from scratch.

Google "file recovery" and see what you find.

Cheers!
--
Mark Turner
www.markturner.net


Colleen McCarthy wrote:
Hi Folks,

On Monday I was backing up certain files and folders on my laptop to a flash
drive. When I do this, I put all of the files and folders into one folder
and just copy the big folder to the flash.
The copy halted on a file that was open. I closed the file, but could not
find the icon for the copy that was in progress. It appeared that
attempting to copy the open file had halted the copy. Does it usually
happen that trying to copy an open file causes the entire copy to halt? If
not, is there somewhere else that I could have looked other than the tray to
see information on the copy?

I did a show properties on the flash drive, and it only had about 660MB on
it. The folder that I was copying was 800MB, so I knew that all of the
files and folders within it had not been copied.

I decided to delete the files off of the flash drive and start the copy
again. I started the delete, then walked away from the laptop. When I came
back a few hours later-- the files were gone from the flash drive-- but most
of them were also gone from the folder from which I was copying them! I
looked in the recycle bin and they weren't there. I searched the laptop for
a few of them, and search could not find them.

Does anyone have any idea what might have happened? Does anyone know if
these files are still on my machine?

I'm running XP.

Thanks much!

Colleen

(h) 919.460.0641
(c) 919.349.4015


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