Recovering Excel Files

Recuva
1

This my first time using Recuva. When a friend had deleted a load of Excel files. He is a stamp collector and the files had been gathered over many years so it was important that all his hours of work were not wasted.I came across the Recuva program in a magazine and thought it might help recover the files. I don't know if it is relevant but I down loaded the program from my machine using Window Vista onto a Memory Stick and then ran it from the stick on his machine which has Windows XP. The recovery appeared to go well but when I tried to open the recovered Excel file it just came up as a load of gobbledegook and was unreadable. The same thing happened using my windows 7. Can anybody shed some light on this problem. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks in anticipation

Runner

2

The files recovered contain errors this is why you cannot open them correctly in Excel.

Recovering files is an imperfect procedure, it doesn't always yeld success because it's very dependant on various factors such as:

-duration of PC usage after deletion.

-new files created have overwritten clusters belonging to deleted files.

-Vista defrag/optimisation has overwritten clusters belonging to deleted files.

Richard S.

3

Thanks Richard. It is possible, the files have been deleted for some time now because he thought that once deleted they couldn't be recovered. Its a shame because he has catalogued these records over many years.

Chas

4

Try running a deep scan, which will probably run for hours. It is possible that several copies of the lost Excel files will be found, from edits and other operations. Recover them to the flash drive. They may not be up to date, but better than nothing.

If your friend has been gathering data over several years and not taken a backup then he is a rather foolish philatelist.

5

Try running a deep scan, which will probably run for hours. It is possible that several copies of the lost Excel files will be found, from edits and other operations. Recover them to the flash drive. They may not be up to date, but better than nothing.

If your friend has been gathering data over several years and not taken a backup then he is a rather foolish philatelist.

6

Thanks for the info. I was going to suggest to him that he tries a deep scan. He can't lose anything!! I have been trying to get him to back up his files for some time but you know some people never learn until this happens. I will post the results when he has carried this out. Thanks again.

Chas