file recovery

passingthrough

apologies if this is the wrong forum so feel free to move it. i was recently doing a college project on powerpoint and someone managed to save over my project with a blank page, is there anyway to go back a few saves if you know what i mean or do i have to start again

Kevster

You could try an undelete programme. I'm not sure how Windows handles an 'overwrite' event such as this. You might be lucky in that it saved the new [empty] presentation to a completely new location on your disk, and just marked your original presentation as a deleted file. I have a strong feeling that this is what Windows does in situations like this, and therefore your file should be recoverable. Do you have a good undelete tool?

...then again, sometimes starting fresh can be good!

Kevin

Capt'n Midnight

over 20 years ago in the days before hard drives the default option was to save a backup file

nowadays when hard drives are a million times bigger than the 5 1/4 floppies, the option to save backups is hidden away

/RANT


get photorec and ask it to look for PPT files



windows is fairly aggressive at reusing emptied space, I can't think of any other mainstream OS that needs / emphasises defragmentation = which is basically a way to wipe deleted files

Kevster

Is that true, Capt'n? Im 27 and have prob been using computers for just over 20 years at this stage. I obviously wasn't using word processors in my 'early' years though! I was going to mention here in my first reply how the default option in MS Word is to NOT autosave to a new/backup file. It still saves to a temporary file though, doesn't it?

The best thing to learn from this - as many others will say too - is to always keep multiple copies of important documents. I always have at least 3 locations for all of my files (portable hard-disk, internal hard-disk, and laptop).

Capt'n Midnight

Kevster wrote: »

Is that true, Capt'n? Im 27 and have prob been using computers for just over 20 years at this stage. I obviously wasn't using word processors in my 'early' years though! I was going to mention here in my first reply how the default option in MS Word is to NOT autosave to a new/backup file. It still saves to a temporary file though, doesn't it?

sorta, if you have fast save on then it kinda adds keystrokes at the end of the file and tries to make sense of the mess later on

Full save, saves the document on disk in the order it is on screen and so a recovery is more likely

My main gripe about this is that computers are fast and disks are huge, and unless you are editing a 500 page novel or have an awful lot of pictures in your documents, the overhead in saving a backup copy every 10-15 minutes is not going to affect the casual or inexperienced user much. There is an issue with laptops where saving will affect the battery life a little. Overall IMHO more time is lost by the average user through lost data than is saved by quicker response. Anyone proficient enough to use wordprocessors without training wheels can of course turn off backup copy and the other stuff


Ctrl-S is your friend , no need to go to menus.


Also if the document is important then save with a new name every time you reach a milestone ( you decide )

VAX VMS operating system saved files with a different revision number each save, so after a while you would have loads of them and could revert back to any of the previous ones instantly. To free up space you just used PURGE to remove the earlier versions. But that was back in the 1980's - must fire up the old timemachine some time