undelete files
 

OK, I've been incredibly stupid. I use SuSE 10 on my laptop - typed up some minutes of a meeting, saved them on the laptop. Moved them to USB stick (FAT 32 formatted). Went to move files to desktop at work (Windows XP), realised they were in ODT format with Word will not read - so without thinking deleted them from the USB stick. Then realised I had moved them - not copied them - from the laptop!!!! So no files any more either on laptop or USB stick.

How can I get them back - if at all? I have tried downloading file restorers for Windows. They find a file with the right name but the content is some text I had deleted last year from a different file.

I have tried unmounting the partition with original files on the laptop and running reiserfsck on them - to no effet, and grep again to no effect.

Any ideas before I jump in the river out of shame and emabarassment!

Donald

Since the pen drive is FAT formatted, you might find the best undelete tools for it are for Windows. I can't suggest a specific product, I'm afraid, but googling "undelete usb pendrive" brought up a few promising-looking links (almost all for Windows, of course).

I honestly don't know whether there's a FAT undelete program for Linux. Hopefully someone else here will know more on that. Deleted files on a FAT FS should be reasonably simple for an undelete program to recover.

Whatever you do though, don't save anything else to the device until you've tried the undelete process.

One other thing to check before you panic is your desktop trashcan, on both the Suse and Windows machines. You might even get lucky and find your files got put there. Would depend on how you deleted them, of course, but it's worth checking.


Hope that helps :)

I would try some tools like RecoverNT which can undelete files in FAT format. This is for Windows and you would be best recovering the fies there in my opinion since there is more software available.

It is extremely important that you do not use the pen drive for the time being as you could overwrite the deleted file you wish to recover.

Hope this helps you out.

Thanks,

Andy