gHacks technology news » recover http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 File Recovery with Undelete My Files http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/21/file-recovery-with-undelete-my-files/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/21/file-recovery-with-undelete-my-files/#comments Sat, 21 Jun 2008 08:36:41 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5060 File Recovery tools are flooding the software market these days and it takes more than to provide a way to recover files to stick out of the masses. Undelete My Files offers several features that make it at least an interesting application to try. The file recovery is obviously the dominating component of the software. Hard Disks can be scanned which usually does not take longer than a few seconds – depending on the size of the hard drive – and the results are displayed afterward. One interesting aspect of this procedure is that multiple hard disks can be selected at once. Most other tools scan hard disks on a per disk basis only.

Another interesting aspect of that scan for deleted files is the option to preview items before they are recovered. Every file can be marked and a click on the preview button opens the file in the default viewer. It becomes pretty obvious if a file can be recovered, chances are slim if the default viewer cannot open it. If the file displays fine on the other hand chances are good that it can be recovered without difficulties.

Undelete My Files provides access to two specialized recovery operations: Media and Mail Recovery. Both target specific files and try to recover them. The advantage of using Media Recovery is that it specifically targets multimedia files offering a preview pane for quick file previews.

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Mail Rescue tries to recover Microsoft Outlook Express, MS Outlook, Eudora and Netscape mails. The software automatically tries to locate the installation folders and proposes a system scan if none can be found.

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Another function provided by Undelete My Files is the Advanced File Search. That’s a nice function if you know what you are looking for. You can pinpoint the tool to search specific folders, look for certain names and file types, sizes and attributes. Pretty convenient if you want to recover specific files.

The last two functions are not related to file recovery. The first is a disk wiper that deleted existing files on the disk securely so that they cannot be recovered by normal means. The other the creation of a Emergency Disk Image which creates a snapshot of a disk to work with later on. That’s actually a great idea to prevent that deleted files are overwritten by new files and the same way professionals are handling this issue.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/21/file-recovery-with-undelete-my-files/feed/ 12 Copy Data from partially unreadable files http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/02/copy-data-from-partially-unreadable-files/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/02/copy-data-from-partially-unreadable-files/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:35:43 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/02/copy-data-from-partially-unreadable-files/ About eight years ago I was backing up some pretty valuable files on CD. I should add valuable to me. One Cd contained demos of me and my clan playing Unreal Tournament capture the flag and I’ve always seen this as a part of my history. Well, I tried to copy the CD to my hard drive a few days ago and guess what; Some files could not be read and I lost some of them during the process. At least that’s what I thought until I found the freeware Copy Cat. Copy Cat uses a superior method to copy files by using a byte per byte method.

If a byte is unreadable it skips only that byte by default and tries the next one. This can be very helpful if you want to copy data from scratched or partially unreadable CDs or DVDs, partially unreadable hard drives or other media like zip drives as well. It is possible to change the number of bytes that get skipped during the process. The author recommends that 1 byte is skipped but it is possible to adjust that value to 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 and one million.

You loose of course more data if you set that value to a higher figure. Using Copy Cat can’t be easier. Just select a source file from your hard drive, CD, DVD or removable storage and select a destination directory. Adjust the number of bytes that get skipped if you like and click on copy.

Copy Cat then tried to read the file byte by byte and copy it to your destination. This method has no guarantee of making all unreadable files work again. I think it should have nice results with text documents and problems with archives. I had no unreadable files of both kinds and could not test my theory. I still think it is more likely that you get CRC errors with the archives if bytes have been skipped during the copy.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/02/copy-data-from-partially-unreadable-files/feed/ 1 Recover deleted or corrupted Thunderbird messages http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/04/recover-deleted-or-corrupted-thunderbird-messages/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/04/recover-deleted-or-corrupted-thunderbird-messages/#comments Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:02:50 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/04/recover-deleted-or-corrupted-thunderbird-messages/ It sometimes happens that I delete a mail by accident because it does look like spam or a message that I do not longer need. Thunderbird does not display that message anymore if it is completely deleted from the mail client. Unknown to many Thunderbird does not delete the messages but flags them only which means it is relatively easy to recover corrupted or deleted mails. This method only works if you have not compressed the mail folders because compressing removes deleted messages from the mail files.

Open the Thunderbird Application Data folder which is located in your document and settings folder in Windows. Select the appropriate Thunderbird profile if there is more than one and click on Mail in that profile. You get a listing of all your email addresses. If you setup Firefox to have different mail folders for every email address you have to click in the folder of the email address that received (or send) the message. Otherwise Local Folders is the way to go.

The important files are those without extensions (Trash, Sent, Inbox ..) – locate the one that contained the mail(s) that you have deleted or are corrupted (do not show up anymore). Open it in an text editor, you could use notepad2 for instance for this purpose. Some folders might be rather big so choose a text editor that can handle large files. Thunderbird should be closed completely while editing those files.

All mails are basically stored in that file. The important part for us are the lines X-Mozilla-Status which defines a certain state of a message such as Read, Unread or Deleted. Search for the message(s) that you want to recover and edit the X-Mozilla-Status: XXXX line into X-Mozilla-Status: 0000 for unread or X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 for read messages.

Recovered messages will appear at the bottom of the folder and should be there after you startup Thunderbird for the next time. You sometimes have to delete the .msf file to make this work. If you edited the file Trash you would delete the file Trash.msf afterwards if the mails do not re-appear after a new start of Thunderbird.

source (and additional information)

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