Other Recovery Methods

Recuva
1

This post isn't about Recuva but about other methods that might help in file recovery.

Vista has a feature called Shadow Copy that makes periodic copies of your files. Just what and when it does so... who knows. I have a Word file I update every day and the last Shadow Copy was 7-21. I have about 40gig of photos... the PHOTO folder doesn?t reflect any new photos added for the past few days.

Shadow Copy is by default enabled in Vista even though in Home and Home Premium the tool used to access Shadow Copies is NOT included. But you can get a free tool at www.shadowexplorer.com

I haven't used Shadow Explorer that much but here are some tips. When it scans your system, you'll have to track down possible Shadow Copies of your files in the Shadow Copy directory tree.

In Vista it's something like C:\users\AcountName\Documents. Whether Shadow Copies survive the deletion of the main file and if they do for how long? I don?t know. So act fast. If you can find an old version of your files right click then export to some other directory? preferably on ANOTHER DRIVE! You don?t want to risk writing over deleted files you may also want to recover using Recuva.

Again, it may not help with files that are updated on a regular basis? you might only get back a week old version? but many files are NOT updated? like photos.

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Norton's System Works has a feature that allows you to recover files that have been deleted. I finally tracked down the name: Symantec Norton Protected Recycle Bin

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/security/...2006.01.10.html

Anyway, I don't know how often it's updated... probably when items are deleted from the Recycle Box and it probably stores files until it runs out of room.

But it might provide another option for recovering files without the need for a program like Recuva where files might be have been overwritten. Again, it's best to save to another drive just in case you DO need to use a program like Recuva.

BTW I do NOT know if the above is the same as Norton UnErase

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nsw.n...lg=en&ct=us