recovering overwritten file (replaced)?

[vj_cobalt]

Hi all,

 

I first time did such a stupid thing - said 'replace' when cut/pasted a file to a folder. Unfortunately the file was replaced with an earlier version and Undo didn't help (pasted file was put back to the original folder but the latest version didn't show up). And, unwisely I don't have any backups : )

So, I tried with Recuva and it succeeded to find more than two previous versions of the file - they have the correct date but file size is only 162 bytes. Of course recovering was not possible then. Here is the information I got so far:

 

Filename: ~$30l.docx

Path: E:\Data\...

Size: 162 bytes (162)

State: Excellent

Creation time: 05.08.2012 16:22

Last modification time: 05.08.2012 16:22

Last access time: 05.08.2012 16:22

Comment: No overwritten clusters detected.

 

Any idea if I still have a chance to try something more?

 

I'm with Windows 7, also Ubuntu is installed but I'm quite unfamiliar with using it....

 

Pls, help with ideas if you got some : )

[Super Fast]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/quickwordrecovr/

 

This utility claims to allow adjustable docx truncation to help recover corrupt files.

 

Whether this will help you, I do not know. But it is free, & ALWAYS save to a different drive than you are recovering from.

[vj_cobalt]

Thanks a lot, Super Fast. I'll try it and I'll give a feedback. Nice day!

[vj_cobalt]

Sorry to say but it didn't work.

As far as I understand being dummy user, the recovery tool should somehow find missing archived parts of the XML - if there are such left. Perhaps something that is able to find a particular string in a deleted file would work, if exactly the part of the document containing the string survived. Only I'm not sure if windows writes exaclty over the previous file in case the 'replace' option was chosen - if so, nothing can be done...

[Super Fast]

I am not certain if you want to try this, but I know I had this happen to me once.

_____

 

I had an external drive connected, & I hit system restore to recover from a problem in Windows in order to fix the problem I was having.

Trouble is, I also still had the external drive connected while it was restoring, so it caused me to lose a lot of files on the external drive!

 

I had to use Handy Recovery at the time in order to recover the missing files.

I am not 100% certain, but it may possibly have recovered them if I had re-run System Restore to undo the changes.

_____

 

But you do not have to run System Restore.

Since then, there is a wonderful freeware called System Restore Explorer that allows you to browse the files in System Restore without having to run it.

You can recover saved versions of files.

 

http://nicbedford.co...estoreexplorer/

 

Let me know if System Restore Explorer helps you recover anything. Please do NOT disable System Restore, because that WILL delete the recovery points containing older versions of files & make recovery that much harder.

 

You will want to be sure you have the drive connected that you lost the file, & be sure to browse that drive's restore points with System Restore Explorer to see if you find your doc.