Re: how to get back deleted material?

[mje@xxxxxxxx]

[Leslie Savan:]

> I'm on deadline and I just accidently deleted material I was working
>  on, and also deleted the material on the back-up file. I've tried 
> ALT and F3, but that just restores something else. Is there any way 
> to go deeper into XY (I have XyIII 3.56) to get an "older" back up? 
> Or is there any way at all to salvage this?

Hallo, Leslie.

   I have not posted on this list for a long time, and do not know
if XyWrite has its own methods of storing and recovering deleted
material; what I am about to say assumes not, but focuses purely on
recovering normal deleted-file situations.

   But I decided to write in to let you know urgently that the
first thing you must do is *avoid using the disk* any more at all. 
The deleted material may still be on the disk, but could be
overwritten by new material at any point if the disk is written to at
all.

   To actually recover the material, you ideally need a disk editor
that allows you to inspect any area of the disk and to select portions
of empty space to reconstruct into a new file. Norton Utilities used
to include this, but I'm not sure if they do now. There may be other
similar programs that do the same thing (I would be interested to know
about it myself if so.)
   A distant second-best is a simpler automated utility that tries
to recover files by guessing which areas of the disk constituted the
deleted file. It knows where the deleted file began, then usually
assumes the following sections are consecutive areas on the disk,
which they aren't always. This approach works best with short files,
or at least on disks that aren't too badly fragmented; but it is far
better to use the manual utility, but this does require extreme
caution and the knowledge of how to use it. (You can probably teach
yourself to use such a utility, especially if you have an instruction
manual; but it is not something you can learn in a spare half-hour.)
   Failing this, if it's important enough, I would seek a data
recovery expert's services, although this could be expensive.
   But the most important immediate thing for now is to make sure
the disk is not in any way written to until you have done one of these
things. Stop using it *immediately* until this has been attended to.

 Reading it should be safe if you can be sure that the software
doing the reading does not do any writing at all. But unless you know
the program involved, it may be difficult to be certain of this. And
if your operating system is any version of Windows, it will constantly
do its own writing to the disk anyway, without telling you it is doing
so.
   If you want to try reading files, the only safe way is to use a
non-multi-tasking operating system like the old MS-DOS or some
versions of Linux, *and* use software that will not write its own
stuff to the disk without you explicitly commanding it to (which of
course you won't do in this situation).

 I hope this helps a little. Perhaps others here can give you
more detailed advice. Good luck.
             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.