Monday, May 5th, 2008
Undelete Files with Pandora Recovery
What happens to deleted files after you empty the Recycle Bin?
Strangely enough… they may still be on your hard drive.
To improve system responsiveness, when Windows deletes a file, it does not take the time to actually erase the data encoded on the hard drive. The space occupied by the “deleted” file is treated as empty space — which means the old file may be overwritten by new data at any time. However, if the hard drive has a lot of free space, the old data may remain intact for weeks or months.
Good News: If you accidentally delete a file, you may be able to get your data back…
Many utilities exist that will help you recover your lost data, such as the popular Norton Utilities. Another popular product is Pandora Recovery – and it is free for personal use.
Pandora runs on any modern version of Windows, including Vista. It will scan your NTFS hard drive and bulid a list of all deleted files – along with a estimate of the chance for successful recovery. For the inexperienced, Pandora is loaded with wizards, hints and context-sensitive help. Power users will appreciate the detailed information Pandora provides, and the ability to search for and preview deleted files.
One limitation of Pandora is that it is only intended to recover files from the hard drives of Windows computers (i.e. under the NTFS file system, which is standard for modern versions of Windows). As a result, Pandora will not recover files from USB flash drives, floppy disks, Mac hard drives, Linux hard drives, etc.
Tips…
When faced with a data recovery emergency, avoid any activity that might destroy recoverable data. In other words, don’t download and install Pandora onto the same hard drive that needs recovery. If you need to recover data from your system disk, remove the hard drive, install Pandora on another computer, and attach the recovery-drive to that machine as a secondary drive. Also, when recovering files, save them onto a flash drive or other storage device… not onto the same drive holding the deleted files.
To increase your chances of recovering your lost files, install Pandora and check out the built-in help, so you have it ready and know how to use it when you need it. You may also want to consider buying Pandora Mobile Recovery Preinstalled on a flash drive. According to the manufacturer…
Pandora Mobile Recovery is a portable version of Pandora Recovery that requires no installation and is distributed together with a removable storage unit (512MB USB jump drive) as a part of Pandora PowerPack. Every user of Pandora Mobile Recovery enjoys an increase in the data recovery success rate through two major direct benefits …
1. No deleted data gets corrupted during the installation process. (Each installation of any software takes up some space on your hard drive. This will likely overwrite some of the deleted data making it unrecoverable.)
2. No deleted data gets corrupted during recovery. If you recover deleted files to a drive that the data originally resided on, the recovered data will have to take some of the space on the disk. (It is very likely that some of the deleted data will get overwritten and corrupted in the process.) With Pandora Power Pack you can simply recover the deleted data to the Pandora Mobile Recovery removable storage unit.
Sources:
Pandora Recovery Home Page
http://www.pandorarecovery.com/
Pandora Recovery Tips
http://www.pandorarecovery.com/file_recovery_tips/
Pandora Recovery at cnet.com
http://www.download.com/Pandora-Recovery/3000-2094_4-10694796.html
Pandora Recovery at softpedia.com
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/Pandora-Recovery.shtml
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