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oops - user accidentally deleted profile

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One of my clients "accidentally" deleted his user profile on a W982E machine. Any way to get back the data that was housed on his profile (i.e. over 1000 jpeg files, and lots of word doc'c)?

8 replies

by isys

Try disk recovery software like Norton Utilities and charge by the hour.

by mm212

Try Recover 98 Express from

http://www.lc-tech.com/recover98%20network.asp (be sure to remove any spaces that might have crept into that address). It can be run from a floppy disk so you won't need to fear copying it to the hard drive.

Be sureto STOP using that computer until you can run a recovery program on it or you risk overwriting the deleted files.

by shanghai sam

Unfortunately, there won't be a lot to recover.
When something is deleted in Windows, it moves to the recycle bin. This process garbles up the file name. When the size of the files in the bin exceeds a certain size (f.e. 10% of the HD size), the oldest files are purged. Forever.
I can imagine that a profile is larger than the trash can. So by the time the last files are moved to the recycle bin, the first are already gone.

Maybe a silly question: do you have a backup? If not, you'll soon find out that a backup solution is much cheaper (in terms of Total Cost of Ownership) than a recovery solution.

by akstephr

Backup????? Why would he have wanted to make a backup??? And unfortunately I don't have the time to do backup's -- I remind clients to do that & I walk them through it, if necessary, but this one didn't think he would need to backup the computer. (When I asked him, his response was "Well, I thought you could fix anything!") Needless to say, I did get about a third of the data recovered thanks to Fix-It Utilities recovery, and my client now knows to backup his data on a regular basis.

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