best undelete utility ?

For a start, did you google with the name of whatever OS you use as part of the search criteria?

It's useful to google for "review" as well; utilities like that are quite likely to have been subjected to reviews like "the best 10 undelete utilities".

Are you considering only free utilities or paid-for ones too? If free, did you put "free" in your search criteria?

I hope you're not using the machine on which you wish to run the utility to do any of your research etc; any undelete facility works best used as soon as possible after the problem occurred, before the space on disk that the file occupied has been re-used for something else. The more activity that takes place on your machine after that happened, the more likely it is that there will be no file to recover.

You need to ask yourself why you don't have a backup of the file concerned.

What sorts of file do you actually want to undelete?

BTW don't do anything more on the machine you want to recover your deleted files from - it is Murphy's Law that the downloads and swapfile will splatter whatever it is you are trying to recover.

Any half decent undeleter will get files back shortly after they have been deleted (they may still even be in the waste paper basket).

Norton makes a pig's ear of damaged JPEG media cards and is best avoided for that purpose. Other than that they are all pretty much of a muchness. Pick one that reviews well and pray!

So I took your advice and tried googling for:- "Review of 'undelete' utilities for Windows XP" That produced a mere 23 pages of supposed file undeleting utilities !

Bear in mind that a lot of the "free" ones are only free to download, install and run. As soon as you actually want to I undelete anything, a charge is involved.

Tim

Maybe it'd be better to google for "cheap" then, to weed out all the misleadingly-described "free" ones.

As a minor point, I wouldn't suggest you write a question sentence when you're googling for something; so instead of googling for

"Review of 'undelete' utilities for Windows XP"

I'd use

xp undelete review

because those are the only relevant keywords. Googling with those I find the very first hit is for a recent review of such utilities, at

and that suggests 'Recuva' is good. See:

In particular, this utility doesn't need to be installed, if you use the 'Portable' version. Remember you don't want to do ANYTHING unnecessary on the pc in question, so avoiding an install is a good idea.

Personally I'd also google

Recuva review

and read some of the user comments before deciding to use it - but I'd do that on a different PC!

On 16 Mar 2014, Martin Brown grunted:

Supplementary question...

I use a NAS (ReadyNas Duo v2) at home for all my data files; I access this from any one of several PCs in the house (Windows 7/XP); however this means that if I delete a file, it just dissappears, as opposed to being transferred to the Recycle Bin, as it would if I was working on the C: drive. To me it's the only real disadvantage of using the NAS.

Is there a way for me to introduce a Recycle Bin (or equivalent 'undelete' functionality)?

I do have proper backups etc; this is just for those occasional 'ohno seconds' when you realise you've just deleted the wrong file by mistake!

OK try this one.

Make sure you watch the installer like a hawk as most of their free stuff comes with optional Google bits and bobs, but they can be declined. Brian

Restore it from your backup! You do do backups?

If its win8 then file history works. If its earlier then Memeo autobackup works (its what apple pinched the idea for time machine from). Failing that there are plenty of free ones on magazines.

As for recovering from disks then if you have been using the machine to do anything you are reducing your chances by the second. The various bits of software will be overwriting the free bits of disk as it runs. You need to switch it off, take the drive out and put it in another machine to run the undelete software on to get the best chance of winning.

You can try googling for something like "bootable file recovery" and try downloading a bootable image if you don't have another machine but I haven't tried any of them so I can't comment on how well they work.

This will be of no help right now but maybe it's something to think about for the future: Mac OSX Time Machine is perfect for this problem.

I would think: only if the OS (probably some flavour of linux) on the NAS itself supports such a thing.

I guess it depends on how you use your NAS in the first place; for example, are you using it to hold the only copy of some files? It's a bad idea to have 'only copies' anywhere - you really need to keep several copies...

I use Dropbox a lot, to keep files in sync across multiple computers. Of course if I accidentally delete a file on one machine's Dropbox, the Dropbox software will sync that delete activity across them all - so I will lose all the on-disk copies. But the Dropbox servers retain copies of all those files for 30 days (or longer if you pay extra). But as well as that I run backup software on all the machines; some backups of files that are not themselves in Dropbox are made into folders within Dropbox, and I also have some backups that copy files that are in Dropbox to other locations on the machines' hard drives (or for machines which have more than one drive, t another drive).

I have thought about getting a NAS, but if I did I think I'd only use it as another location for backups from primary disks.

In your situation I would run backups of NAS files to each of your other machines.

Most NAS device run under Linux with Linux file systems. Delete really is delete, the data is probably still in the physical sectors/clusters on the disc but AIUI there is no easy means of finding those sectors short of searching the entire free space for a data match and even then if you find one sector there is no link to which is the next and or previous one.

The NAS might have a "recycle" bin option in it's firmware.

With the size of modern drives its getting hard to be good on back ups. However some of those network drives can be quite good. Sadly most times when things go missing, the file you want is not there either!

Brian

You need to run a proper backup system not just copies.

Mine is three NAS drives.

I run file history to one NAS. That nas copies itself to two others each night It also does weekly copies to alternate ones.

There are also a couple of images to facilitate recovery of the system.

Google also offer free unlimited storage for picasa as long as you are content with low resolution jpegs (~3 Mpixel) which makes pictures a lot safer.

either!

And it needs to be automatic.

Window boxes here use Secondcopy to transfer and new/changed files to each users area on the server at each log off. Deleted files are archived to another user directory on the server by Secondcopy. They accumulate so I have a script, that runs just before each fullback up, that deletes stuff in there that is older than 30 days.

The server backs itself up every night to a NAS drive, full backup once a week, nightly incremetals and 3 complete sets kept.

It all "just happens" and I get emails if Secondcopy or the server backup has a problem.

Handy Recovery 1.0 is about as good as it gets in the 'freeby' line. I have it installed to guard against that embarrassing condition known as "Premature Deletion". It's also proved to be a useful tool whenever I have had to deal with any similarly afflicted customers who've managed to 'lose their files'.

My crappily mis-remembered fragments of Latin suggest to me that piriform means pear-shaped. Question: Before or after using their products?

I've just downloaded the free version of Recuva and tried using it. It's brilliant ! Thanks, John.