Undelete Utility

One of my cow-orkers deleted a file on a network data drive that he would like to recover. Since it was not a local drive there was no recycle bin or anything simple involved.

A quick hunt for undelete utilities shows plenty of them out there, but I didn't see any that worked across a network.

It is not a life or death situation -- the file can be re-created, but it will take several hours of work to do so.

Recommendations?

tanstaafl.

Please don't consider this reply as authoritative on the subject, somebody else will come along soon and provide that. Like you, I was faced with a similar problem recently...

Windows Server 2003 can employ a "previous versions" technology where for selected locations (network shares), n shadow copies are kept of modified/deleted files. See if this has been enabled on your server. If it has, you need to install the Previous Versions client application within XP etc. to access them across a network. You could try right-clicking the folder that held the deleted file and see if it's there on the context menu.

You won't be able to undelete across the network. You'll have to use an undelete utility on the file server itself. Do you have access to that computer, and, if so, what operating system is it running?

First of all, I hope the person has stopped using the drive at all before this recovery process is attempted. We don't want to write over the file.

I'm not sure exactly how this drive is networked, but this program claims support for networked drives. I don't know if this program does, but it seems to be one of the more popular apps for file recovery (I just snagged it, as it's free at the moment).

A couple others that you may or may not have stumbled across can be found here and here.

Thanks, Matt. I checked the first two out, they don't support recovery across a network; the link to the third one seems to be broken.

Probably by now Mr. cow-orker has given up and spent an hour or two recreating the file. It was an audio file of some kind.

tanstaafl.

I guess I didn't understand what you meant by "over the network." The first program states that it can recover "from a network drive," so I guess you could map their main drive on your machine for a while.

Odd, though. That third link works just fine for me...oh wait, it's the last one that doesn't work. Strange. It worked right when I posted that...

No. They mean that you can recover something somebody deleted over the network by running something on the server.

"Recovers files deleted from a network share. (File Scavenger must be run on the computer where the share is defined.)"

All the undelete utilities will need you to install and run it on the server itself.