Did ccleaner nuke Palm data?

[dharris]

I ran ccleaner for the first time yesterday on my wife's aging laptop. I looked through the options of what it said it would clean, I ran analyze and reviewed the list of files that it said it would delete and then cleaned it up.

 

Today my wife called me hysterical because when she tries to launch Palm Desktop to look up a contact there is nothing there. Typically it would just launch, but today it asked her to choose a user and there were no users listed! She looked in the directory where the files are stored and the key files appear to be empty.

 

I feel like I screwed up royally for a number of reasons:

• I tried a new disk cleaner on my wife's computer first.
  
• I didn't backup critical directories (such as her palm data)
  
• She hasn't synced her (now dead) Palm in many months
  

 

Tonight I'm going to try to recover the files from the disk using an undelete utility. I would appreciate any constructive suggestions, including (but not limited to) answers to any of the following:

 

1. Have you ever had a problem with ccleaner and Palm desktop files?
   
2. Will an undelete utility likely work? or does ccleaner really clean things up hard?
   
3. Do you have any suggestions for good undelete utilities?
   
4. Am I missing something key in ccleaner which will magically solve my problem?
   

 

[lokoike]

I just scanned 'winapp.ini' (CCleaner's program cleaning database) and no Palm software was listed anywhere. So it is doubtful that CCleaner removed any files from either the PDA or the Palm software. The only way the Palm software would have been affected is if it had saved some important files in a Temp folder, in which case, that would be Palm's fault, not CCleaner's.

 

A question I have for you: was the PDA connected to the computer when you ran CCleaner? I'm not sure how Windows treats a PDA, but I would assume that it treats it like another hard drive. If there are any folders named Temp on your PDA, CCleaner may have cleaned those out, but if the device wasn't hooked up, then CCleaner wouldn't have touched it.

 

Could you try hooking up the PDA and seeing if it shows up in My Computer as another drive? Perhaps all of the files are still intact, and Palm Desktop is just not seeing them. If the files are still on the PDA, try reinstalling Palm Desktop.

 

As far as how vigorously CCleaner cleans, that depends on what settings you have. If you installed CCleaner and pretty much left the options alone, you should be okay. The default removal for CCleaner is to simply delete the files, and not do any overwrites. But if you manually turned on the 'Secure file deletion' option (Options > Settings), and CCleaner did delete files from the PDA, you most likely won't be able to recover them with software. PC Inspector File Recovery is a free file recovering app, in case you do end up needing one.

 

Once again, I must stress that there is very little chance that CCleaner did this, and if it did, it is most likely Palm's fault. Hope this helps.

[dharris]

A question I have for you: was the PDA connected to the computer when you ran CCleaner?

 

No, in fact it hasn't been connected in many months. It's also a 5+ yr old device and wouldn't likely appear as a hard drive.

 

Thanks for the thoroughness of your reply. I will look at the file recovery utility you mentioned.

 

Doug

[lokoike]

No, in fact it hasn't been connected in many months. It's also a 5+ yr old device and wouldn't likely appear as a hard drive.

 

Thanks for the thoroughness of your reply. I will look at the file recovery utility you mentioned.

 

Doug

 

If it wasn't connected, CCleaner didn't touch it. The only time CCleaner cleans is when you tell it to. Unlike a lot of apps, CCleaner does not run in the background after you close it. So you can rest assured that everything is still on the PDA, safe and sound. Using a file recovery program won't be necessary, or even helpful, in this situation.

 

And the age of the PDA wouldn't determine how Windows would detect it. I have connected 13 year old hard drives to my laptop via an IDE>USB cable, and Windows recognizes them with no problems. I would recommend still seeing if you can view the PDA's contents in My Computer, just to see if anything is still on it. If it is empty, either your Palm software cleared it out, or your wife accidently manually removed some files.

 

If you still have the Palm software on a disk, I highly recommend uninstalling/reinstalling it. I would put my money on that being your problem.

[dharris]

Hmmm, perhaps I wasn't clear enough.

 

My wife hasn't used the actual PDA for 6+ months, but she uses the Palm Desktop application to enter contact information, calendar events, etc. -- not to sync, but just as a PIM.

 

So, today when she launched Palm Desktop (a desktop application running under Win XP on her laptop), the contact data didn't appear.

 

Is it possible that ccleaner simply nuked some saved information from this app which resided in the registry?

[Andavari]

Is it possible that ccleaner simply nuked some saved information from this app which resided in the registry?

 

If it isn't listed in any of CCleaner's .ini files winapp.ini, etc., then there isn't a cleaning routine for it. With that said the only part of CCleaner that could touch it would be the Issues scanner, e.g.; registry cleaner in CCleaner however that's highly unlikely.

 

If you created the backup .reg file that CCleaner would have prompted you to do when running the Issues scanner you could open that .reg file in Notepad and look for Palm entries, etc.

 

Also if you're using a version of Windows with System Restore you could try that - although I have no ideal if that would resurrect the data, more than likely it wouldn't. It could just be data corruption.

[Eldmannen]

I dont see how it could clean the Palm.

It was in TEMP dir?

 

Hope you can recover...

[dharris]

I'm working on the recovery now.

 

I'm pretty sure the files were in subdirectories under C:\Program Files\Handspring\UserName\ -- such as address\address.dat, datebook\datebook.dat

 

I've booted using a Kubuntu linux livecd and have mounted the partition in read-only mode. Using a linux-based undelete utility, I see some of the files, but not the full file. For example, it claims that it will only be able to recover 61% of address.dat :-(

 

Does CCleaner log its actions somewhere? I would really like some diagnostic information.

 

 

I'm going to enable receiving email from other users. If anybody would like to send me a message for more immediate help, I'm available on all major IM networks -- I won't post my contact info here, but send me email and I'll let you know how to reach me.

[krit86lr]

Hi dharris,

 

The first thing that you should do is a System Restore. Choose a restore point that is dated before the information was noticed missing. After that do the uninstall/reinstall as suggested.

 

You really need to determine how, and why the files disappeared. What I would suggest is to have your wife enter in a new contact, and save it how she normally would. Then open up the contact info, and look at the full file path, and see if it says 'TEMP' anywhere.

 

I had a similar situation as yours, but after investigating I realized that the missing info was in a temp folder which is why it got deleted.

 

Keep us posted! Good luck.

[krit86lr]

Does CCleaner log its actions somewhere?

 

If you back it up when it asks you to. But CCleaner didn't do it if it wasn't a temp folder. Something else happened.

 

Scouts honor. ; ) Have thoroughly read the Beginners Guide yet?

K

[dharris]

I've recovered some of the files using Restoration. Using a file viewer/editor, I can see that some of the data she wants is there, but as of now the Palm Desktop application isn't handling it at all.

 

I'm inclined to believe that CCleaner did indeed do this. In Restoration, the modificied date of htese files is exactly the same as all the files which are localed under various Temp directories. What's odd, however, is that the full path show for these files includes a weird collection of non-ASCII characters.

 

Investigating further...

[dharris]

Everything new is saved under C:\Program Files\Handspring\UserName

 

Nothing similar to temp.

 

I realize that there's little anybody reading this can do. I would suggest to the author(s) of ccleaner that they increase the default level of logging. If there were a simple list of files which had been deleted, then I would gladly admit -- "hey, my bad -- these were under \temp"... but I have found nothing to back this up.

 

If, on the other hand, this sort of log showed that ccleaner nuked files in an unexpected location, then the log file would be invaluable for debugging.

[lokoike]

Good point! A logging feature would be nice for CCleaner, as long as the option to turn it off was also included. After all, a major feature of CCleaner is cleaning out logs made by other programs.

 

That said, I still would highly doubt that CCleaner did this, since Palm is never listed at all in winapp.ini. CCleaner does not simply search your hard drive for folders labeled "temp", and delete the contents of them. It will only clean specified temp folders, such as the ones that contain Windows temp files, and the temp folders of programs listed in winapp.ini.

 

Since your Palm application meets neither of these criteria, there is little to no chance that CCleaner could have done this. Like Andavari said, the only possible thing CCleaner could have goofed up is entries in your registy, in which case the files themselves would still be there (although the Palm app might not register that they are).

[dharris]

Good point! A logging feature would be nice for CCleaner, as long as the option to turn it off was also included. After all, a major feature of CCleaner is cleaning out logs made by other programs.

 

 

Naturally that option would be necessary. I think a reasonable default setting would be to keep logs of the most recent 3-5 cleanings.

 

I don't doubt any of you when you say that ccleaner doesn't blindly delete things looking like "temp" and doesn't go after things that aren't specified in the winapp.ini. However, my experience as a software developer has taught me that when there's a problem, the cause is likely the last thing changed. The fact that these files are shown as deleted at the same time as the stuff deleted from the directories that were cleaned by ccleaner seems too much of a coincidence.

 

As for my particular problem, the files are too corrupted for Palm Desktop to read. One file recovery program suggests that the address book was 61% recovered. I'm going to ask Google about the particulars of this file format and/or dive into it myself. I can see plain text address info mixed in with non-ASCII characters -- presumably field delimiters or metadata. Then I'll whip up something to extract as much as I can.

 

I did a Windows System Restore, but that didn't help. MS documentation lists the locations and file extensions stored by this utility and .DAT is not one of them.

 

There are lots of lessons learned here for me:

1. Never try new system utilities w/o backing up first.

2. Perform backups more regularly anyway.

3. Try the new software on a non-critical computer (i.e. not your spouse's)

 

Thanks for your comments and help on this. Too bad it didn't work out better.

[krit86lr]

I think a reasonable default setting would be to keep logs of the most recent 3-5 cleanings.

 

This isn't exactly what you're referring to, but CCleaner cleans the options that you choose for it to clean. Therefore, it cleans what you tell it to.