Recovering overwritten files

jaarius

One of the guys here in work edited a copy of a file on the network. Somebody else replaced that spreadsheet with their own. Is there anyway to recover the lost data?


j

petes

Do you take regular backups?

seamus

Not usually. No backups?

There is an off-chance that the guy who edited it first, still have a temp file on his machine which contains most of his data.

This is where shadow copies are a godsend.

jaarius

Shadow copy is something that would be a big help here. Sadly tis not the case. We make weekly backups. He is after losing a weeks work on some spread sheet.

j

Capt'n Midnight

[RANT] name any other spreadsheet application apart from Excel, available anytime in the last 20 years, that doesn't make backup copies by default, or at the worst allows you toggle a setting that will make backup copies of all files from then on ? [/RANT]

In exel - save as - options and hidden away is an option to always make backup copies, but it's on a per file basis :mad:

check the %temp% folder and rename the extension to .xls if anything looks the same size - but since microsoft started to use fast save / incremental saves this is clutching at straws ( works well for autocad and many non-microsoft apps)

any chance they emailed it somewhere

try rest2514 too on the offchance the file was saved in a different area of the drive ( unlikely )

Thomas_S_Hunterson

If you're technically able, maybe something like WinHEX Forensic Edition or X-Ways Forensics, it's very expensive though,
http://www.winhex.com
or possibly STD linux will recover it for you, for free. It's bundled with a fair bit of forensics software.
http://www.s-t-d.org

Either of these are more or less a last resort, if the other methods fail and the spreadsheet is worth the hassle.