windows 7 - How to best recover archived folder which appears as a file on NTFS drive?

06
2014-04
  • Sven

    I archived a folder to an external HDD and kept it in sync with another one using Sync Toy. Now I see that the folder appears as a 0 byte file on both HDDs. Everything else is fine and readable. I am using Windows 7 64bit Home Premium and NTFS on all disks. Is checkdisk safe or should I try some recovery tools first? How would you approach this issue?

    • Answers
  • Sven

    I used a free (for personal use) tool named Recuva which managed to find those lost folders and files successfully. I only lost names of some folders and files.

    Also ran the Windows tool Check Disk which found no problems whatsoever. Odd. Looks like Sync Toy is not to blame here.


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  • vijay.shad

    My laptop has two os. one is windows vista. and other is Ubuntu. I am currently on ubuntu system, this is my primary OS.

    There are 4 partitions of my hard disk

    1. Windows OS
    2. Linux(Ubuntu OS)
    3. Data

    Now the problem part. The data partition is NTFS. I have mounted this partition on the location /media/windrive-a under ubuntu OS.

    A little while back i decided to delete the mounting of the data partition and i fired command rm -r /media/windrive-a/. To give me a shock; all my data on data drive is gone.

    Now, I know this is not the command to remove mounted partition. But I have committed the wrong. Is there any way i can get my data back. These are very important data for me.

    Please suggest.


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  • geek

    Your best bet would be to "freeze" the data filesystem and don't alter it. For recovery attempts, make a partition image with dd and try to recover files from there.

    WARNING: dd is a dangerous command if you misuse it by mistake, so make sure you understand what it does, how it does it and double check the command line before hitting Enter.

    You might want to try TestDisk, it claims to be able to recover stuff from NTFS. Can't vouch for it, because I've never had to deal with such situations (yau, I've never experienced loss of personal data, see below why).

    Also, since you said that the data is very important to you, there's something else you must consider. If you would have a backup, that would save you. It seems you don't have one yet, so after dealing with data loss, it'll be a good idea to think about a backup strategy for really important data.

  • Dennis Williamson

    In the old times I used to use undelete, a DOS command that usually required remembering the first letter of the archive list it showed you (?y_file.doc ) and required no alteration, no save or touch the disk (btw, an overwrite with the same name of the file will kill any possibility of recovering it, as far as I know). As all what can save you is a temporary memory, would be overwritten with new activity.

    For NTFS, I have not needed to try, (I am on the same page as Geek, I'm paranoid with backups, so rarely lose something), but from time to time I end up at below site, I am curious if it really is useful. Probably it is, quite, and it is open source :

    http://ntfsundelete.com