Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Mark Turner <markt AT siteseers.net>]

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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