Recover My Files: Nothing is lost forever!

In an age of “real time” snapshots and Terabytes of storage, one might start to reason “As long as I live, I will never lose data again”. Sorry for the movie quote rip-off (sort of) my Mom was a big Gone with the Wind fan. You can imagine my horror when it released on VHS tape it played in my house repeatedly. I remember wishing the tape would stretch or break, it never did even after over 300 viewings.
However, I digress; it seems in the area of File recovery tools two scenarios exist. One you have all the latest and greatest backup, replication and Business Continuity tools and still cannot seem to recover than one file that the President of the company is looking for. Two you do not have the budget to justify these recovery methodologies.
I had a situation where we were replicating our entire NYC office to an office in Upstate NY. However, because of the amount of data we were transferring to the backup sight we had a 15-20 minute window of potential data loss. Not bad for a mid-sized Financial services firm of with about 120 employees. The constant challenge for me seemed to be how to recover the data users lost within those 15-20 minutes. Yes even with a full data replication in real time, there was always someone who lost a file before it could replicate to the other side.
On one particular day, that was our COO and the file was the operations budget for the next year. He had kept the original budget on the fileserver and copied down the budget to his local machine. Worked on it for two days and went to copy it back to the file server. When windows prompted him, he simply clicked and away he went. Next morning, it was the blank budget template in his network folder. You know where this story is going… He deleted the budget from his local drive after he copied it to the network and yes, he emptied his recycling bin.
Bad for him, but good for me in a way, I got to be the hero when I recovered the budget and I had a chance to discover a great tool. The name is Recover my Files. Now while there are plenty of utilities you can purchase for file recovery. I found this one to be simple to manage and very effective. The user interface is straightforward and file searching is simple. In my case I was looking for an Excel spreadsheet, I just simply chose the drive, chose the file type and hit scan. Within ten minutes, I found and recovered the file.
A little tip for IT Admins out there, make the user leave the room before you install and run the tool. Hey David Copperfield doesn’t show people how he performs his magic tricks right!
Seriously though priced at under $100.00 this is a tool you cannot pass up. If my story doesn’t convince you perhaps the features will. Recover my Files not only recovers files deleted from the recycle bin. It will also recover files after a hard disk crash, accidental formatting (even if you re-installed Windows), or after a portioning error. You can recover files from internal and external drives such as USB, Flash, zip or floppy (yes, some people are still using these). Lastly it works on all Windows file systems from FAT 12 to NTFS5.
You can even download a trial version to try out for 15 days free. Just download the trial at http://www.getdata.com/download.php?FILE=RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe
Trust me A Better Windows World means utilizing all the tricks and tools IT has to offer. Tomorrow we’ll look at another great File Recovery tool for Non-Windows Systems.

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