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Lost info after the save button was pushed. Lost 13 3

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Guest_imported

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Jan 1, 1970
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I accidently pressed the save button and lost 13 pages of info. I need to retrive the lost pages fast, please advise on how?
 
Hi derfs,

What package did you lose the pages from Word, Excel. When you pressed save what happened did the computer crash??

Had you saved the worked before you accidently pressed save?? Was autosave on...

Paul
 
Windows 98 Microsoft word. No crash, don't know about autosave
 
in Microsoft word (windows 98). No crash, just editing and saved changes when I did not want to. don't know about autosave. thanks
 
It's lost dude. By pressing Save you OVERWRITE the existing info that was there before. What you need to do in the future, if you want the original to be kept is: Click on SAVE AS instead of SAVE. This way it'll give you the option of renaming the file instead of the original file being overwritten.

Sorry :(
 
if you have a hardcopy printout you could scan it and fix up the parts that don't get picked up with OCR. Had to do this for a user that had done a similair mistake . [sig][/sig]
 
You know, bdux, that's the best advise yet. Here's a tip master vote for ya. [sig]<p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br><b>FYI</b>...Jack <b>was</b> nimble, Jack <b>was</b> quick...until he got 3rd degree burns when his pants caught on fire.[/sig]
 
If the document was &quot;mission critical&quot;, that is, it contained irreplaceable information, you might be able to recover some or all of it with Power Quest's Lost and Found.

A file overwrite doesn't necessarily &quot;overwrite&quot; anything. If you save an empty file over a pre-existing filename, at worst, you may lose only a few bytes from the original. The rest can be recovered. Recovery would work best if haven't written to the hard drive since you lost the doc (or even used the computer, since Windows writes huge quantities to the swap file every time it runs).

This is truely, one of the most amazing programs I have ever seen. A few months ago, I had an opportunity to give it a good workout. My primary hard disk had taken a big hit and was unreadable by any of my utilities (it turns out that the first 64 sectors had gone totally bad. Anyone who is familiar with the layout of a disk knows that those sectors contain the drive parameter, partition data and the root directory entries).

The process was slow and painstaking (it took about four days) but, not only did I recover all of my data, I recovered files that had been deleted many months previously (obviously, stuff I didn't want anymore... L&F didn't know that).

As a testament to the power of this program please consider the history of the data on this drive: in 1991 it was a whopping 128mb. The contents were copied to 250mb, then a 512mb then a 2gb and finally the 6gb that failed. During those nine years, files were written and deleted, directories where created, moved and deleted, the file system went from DOS 5.0 through seven versions of Windows, firmware sector translation (EZdrive) was used and removed... generally speaking, nothing should have remained from the original drive.

And yet, after running Lost and Found, I opened a curious folder and found myself staring at a ghostly yet exact image of the original directory structure of the original drive. I didn't think it was possible, but seeing was believing.

[sig]<p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= plain black box</a><br>Don't sit down. It's time to dig another one.[/sig]
 
A more practical approach to recovering a single overwritten file is to use the Norton Disk Editor. You would reboot to a floppy containing diskedit.exe, open the drive and search for any text you know the file contained. A word document would probably be formatted with each ascii character separated by hex zeros and you would have to include them in the search.

After finding the first cluster of the file you would copy it to a file on the floppy and link the clusters to the fat chain in diskedit, follow the fat chain through the file and recover each fragment as you go.

Certainly not a simple solution but most of the file could be recovered in a matter of minutes, rather than days.
[sig]<a href=mailto:CraigL@bc-corp.com>CraigL@bc-corp.com</a><br>[/sig]
 
Alt255, when you upgraded each time did you use an imaging program? or xcopy? I'm just curious that Lost & Found went all the way back to the original tree dir amost 9 years ago. Wow, that's something.

Index, I used to have PC Tools Delux (the last version before they went out of business and Windows 3.1 was the norm for home pcs) and their disk editing program did allow for direct sector/byte by byte editing. But then I moved onto Win 95 and it wouldn't work because of the 32fat and long filenames. Does Norton's work in 32fat and with long filenames (or at least show the tild? { ~ = tild}.

I'd like to know. I just might buy it if it does. [sig]<p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br><b>FYI</b>...Jack <b>was</b> nimble, Jack <b>was</b> quick...until he got 3rd degree burns when his pants caught on fire.[/sig]
 
MiggyD, my version of the diskedit is dated 1996. I'm pretty sure there are more recent versions out there but mine seems to do the job pretty well.

When viewing the disk as &quot;directory&quot; the first three columns are &quot;Name&quot;, &quot;.EXT&quot; and &quot;I.D.&quot;. Short names are displayed as &quot;XXXXXXXX&quot; &quot;XXX&quot; and &quot;File&quot; as the ID.

Long filenames are displayed as:
&quot;XXXXXXXX.XXX&quot; &quot;LFN&quot; (the first eight characters followed by a dot and the last three characters, followed by an ID indicating a long filename). Since Windows stores long filenames in additional 32-byte directory entries, the remaining characters are shown later in the directory listing. Perhaps a bit confusing but it makes sense. The diskeditor doesn't show the contents of a drive the way it is interpreted by the OS. It shows the actual contents of the drive. If you switch to hex mode you can go to the boot record or the portion of the boot record known as the partition table and view the physical contents (or an interpreted view that displays lots of useful information).

This program isn't intended to be a file browser so much as a tool for searching, viewing and modifying the physical disk. A dangerous tool in the hands of a novice but probably the most powerful software tool a die-hard can keep in his box. Using maintenance mode, I have used diskedit to access drives that couldn't be read by anything else. It can bypass the OS and access the hardware directly.

Diskedit places itself in &quot;read-only&quot; mode when running under Windows 9x and I'm pretty certain it won't run at all under NT. It's best used after booting to a floppy.
[sig]<a href=mailto:CraigL@bc-corp.com>CraigL@bc-corp.com</a><br>[/sig]
 
Index, thanks for the info. Hopefully a novice wouldn't just jump into diskediting it truely is dangerous. Luckily, I've assembled my first 286 when I was 14 +/- and now past 31.

The PcTools' DiskEdit I mentioned above also had the capability of reading the physical drive in it's native format. And as you should know, it looks like hell with all the hexs on one side and a chr representation on the other. While at that level, you could also change the Disk's OS's ID and all--boy! just reminiscing is making me feel older than I am.

Anyway, I guess I'll have to look around for it. Thanks for responding back. [sig]<p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br><b>FYI</b>...Jack <b>was</b> nimble, Jack <b>was</b> quick...until he got 3rd degree burns when his pants caught on fire.[/sig]
 
Regarding the disk upgrades: the first one consisted of a global directory/file copy using a shareware COMMAND.COM replacement called 4DOS (it's all I had at the time). The second used the Maxtor drive copy software which unnecessary installed EZ-drive (drat that virus). The third used the Seagate software and the fourth, Western Digital.

I don't really understand the technology used by Lost and Found but I get the gist of it. The data stored on magnetic media isn't always an &quot;either-or&quot; proposition. That is to say, an area of the medium can maintain a field even after one or a dozen passes has failed to detect it. If you maximize Lost and Found's sensitivity it is ruthless in tracking down the data.

I understand that certain law enforcement/intelligence agencies use similar, perhaps more sophisticated software to recover evidence from wiped hard drives. If so, I pity the cyber-criminals.

One thing you should remember before you add this to your tool list: you will need a hard drive at least as large as the original where you can recover the lost data. A minor problem (perhaps PQ has addressed it by now) is that both drives must be formatted with the same FAT (16, 32, 32x, etc.) I emphasize the size of the recovery drive only because L&F recovered more data than could possibly fit on the damaged drive.

Alt

P.S. It's good to talk to some folk who don't sticking their fingers in the machinery. MiggyD, what happened to that &quot;Wicked&quot; thing that was coming this way? You make me feel nostalgic.
[sig]<p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= plain black box</a><br>Don't sit down. It's time to dig another one.[/sig]
 
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