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Need help recovering files 'in place'.

gBAZgBAZ Registered User regular
One of my harddrives entirely got deleted, nothing in recycle bin.

The drive was basically full. The recovery software I used required free space to copy the deleted files to.

Is it possible to restore the files and keep them 'in place' on the drive/sectors?
(you know, turnng the deleted '0' flag, into notdeleted '1' flag?)

Btw, it is an external usb drive.

gBAZ on

Posts

  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    No, you're going to need another drive to restore to.

    Drive recovery software won't overwrite any data like that (which technically doing what you suggest would be overwriting the files) because the whole point of drive recovery software is to be non destructive.

    XBL: thewunderbar PSN: thewunderbar NNID: thewunderbar Steam: wunderbar87 Twitter: wunderbar
  • gBAZgBAZ Registered User regular
    So there is no way to just rebuild whatever index is flagging the files as 'not deleted'/location?

  • LD50LD50 Registered User regular
    gBAZ wrote: »
    So there is no way to just rebuild whatever index is flagging the files as 'not deleted'/location?

    Deletion isn't really a flag like that. It's likely that your drive's file system metadata got corrupted somehow. The recovery software can read the contents of the disk, but can't know what the metadata originally was. In any case, even if it could, it wouldn't write data to the drive for safety reasons. You're going to have to recover the data to some empty space somewhere else.

  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    Also you can use the new drive you're probably going to need to create a backup of the data. Because the first problem here is that all of this data only lived in one spot and if it is important enough that you need to recover it than it is important enough that there should be at least 2 copies of it anyway.

    XBL: thewunderbar PSN: thewunderbar NNID: thewunderbar Steam: wunderbar87 Twitter: wunderbar
  • ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    wunderbar wrote: »
    Also you can use the new drive you're probably going to need to create a backup of the data. Because the first problem here is that all of this data only lived in one spot and if it is important enough that you need to recover it than it is important enough that there should be at least 2 copies of it anyway.

    One or more physical backups, and a cloud backup. Use your provider of choice.

    WiiU: Windrunner ; Guild Wars 2: Shadowfire.3940 ; PSN: Bradcopter
  • gBAZgBAZ Registered User regular
    Ah, that sucks. Maybe in the future there could be an easy way to back up just the metadata/index/whatever. :(

    In the meantime, any recommendations on the best free recovery software? (that works on vista 64bit).

    Cnet/Download.com not been good for a long while now, afraid they will have too many toolbars/malware/adware/etc. built into the 'free' trials.

  • ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    Recuva works really well, and it's easy to use.

    WiiU: Windrunner ; Guild Wars 2: Shadowfire.3940 ; PSN: Bradcopter
  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    gBAZ wrote: »
    Ah, that sucks. Maybe in the future there could be an easy way to back up just the metadata/index/whatever. :(

    In the meantime, any recommendations on the best free recovery software? (that works on vista 64bit).

    Cnet/Download.com not been good for a long while now, afraid they will have too many toolbars/malware/adware/etc. built into the 'free' trials.

    That's also not how any of that really works.

    You really just need an actual backup of the data.

    XBL: thewunderbar PSN: thewunderbar NNID: thewunderbar Steam: wunderbar87 Twitter: wunderbar
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