Retrieving lost work

[Babillon]

After a lovely incident with Photoshop, I've been curious... Is there any way to retrieve data from an unresponsive program in WindowsXP?

Example: In the case of Photoshop, the program crashed after a couple hours of work, leaving both myself and my girlfriend frantically trying to stop the work from going down the drain.

How would I have been able to capture the image's information before it gets flushed (whether by ending the process, or some other nasty means)? Is it even possible to recover information like that (I would assume it would, concidering that the info is just left in whatever memory location is was being stored in)?

 

[wolluf]

Do you not save every so often when working 'for a couple of hours'?

I don't use photoshop - does it have an autosave option (like Word, which by default saves a copy of your document every ten minutes).

As for recovering the image from memory - no idea, don't know how photoshop would store its working images in memory.

 

[eyec]

you need some forensics/data recovery experience/help.

search above for the Server Rack - General Data Recovery threads.

 

[linney]

Data recovery.

PC Inspector

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

http://www.restorer2000.com

http://www.runtime.org/hints.htm

Plenty of other recovery software listed here.

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Disk_Management/Error_Checking_and_Repair/

These are more suited to a complete operating system crash rather than one particular program crashing.

 

[Brona]

Greetings,


Well, if the files are erased it is still possible to bring them back. I suppose using powerful data recovery tools such as Active@ Undelete or Uneraser(DOS) for this purpose. The tools works really great, their restore algorithm is mighty indeed. They never failed me before.

http://www.active-undelete.com/

http://www.uneraser.com/

 

[Babillon]

Great! Thanks for the pointer in the right direction. Hopefully one of these will help, though it's not so much that the file is gone, it's that the data stored in memory is flushed once the program's crashed (and there goes work).

Every program that you use to create something needs to have an auto-save feature. >.>