"Undelete in the Home part 2
Recovery Techniques"

Complete Transcript of
Michael Materie – Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
August 30 2008

Alan:  Today on Let’s Talk Computers, we are continuing our conversation on Undelete in the Home. This time we will be focusing on the all-important recovery side. Our guest today is Michael Materie, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Michael.

Michael:  Hi, Alan, how are you?

Alan:  Michael, the last time we were talking about how your new Consumer Edition of Undelete 2009 will allow us to capture any kind of deleted files, no matter how they get deleted – whether it is a Microsoft Service Pack that gets pushed out and deletes a bunch of files or the "oops" factor, where we accidentally delete a file that we are working on. Being able to capture all of these files, that's just one part of the picture. To me, it's so important for the ease of being able to recover these files, to actually be able to find the file files that have been deleted and get them back.

Let’s say that I’m sitting at my computer and I try to bring up a file and realize that it’s gone. It’s like losing my keys. The only time I realize that I’ve lost my keys is when I can’t find them. That could have been 5 minutes ago or ten minutes ago or yesterday that I put my keys down. And now I don’t know where they are. The first thing that someone does is they panic and that’s the worst thing you can do when you’re trying to recover a file, isn't it?

Michael:  One of the shortcomings of the Recycle Bin is that it’s assuming that you knew exactly where the file was when you deleted it. If you deleted off your desktop it's going to be a little tricky to navigate sometimes through. You bring up the C: drive, documents and settings, all users, and track your way all the way down into where the file would have been kept.

One primary feature of the Undelete Product is a very powerful search engine that will allow you to basically supply a little bit of the data on the file, maybe even who owned the file; who deleted the file or when you think it was deleted in the last day or so. It can find everything based on that criterion and allow you to preview those data to make sure you get the right file back.

Alan:  Nowadays, you buy your computer and it has say a 700-Gig drive as a standard or even in some cases, Terabyte drives and you also have external drives that can be huge. Trying to navigate that with the Recycle Bin is not for the faint of heart because it just shows you the drives and all these different files. I can’t sort them; I can’t choose when something was deleted. It would be so much easier to have a timeline that says, "Okay, I’m looking for a .doc file and I know I had it 2 weeks ago."

Michael:  Right. I think that’s one of the new paradigms you bring up - is that as we get so much more data on our computers, even as individual users – I guess many would call it "the Google approach," which is that we are getting a little bit away from neatly filing our cabinets and putting everything in our respective folders into just putting it out there and relying on search technologies, for instance the Google Desktop or Vista’s search functionality.

In this case, that’s the same kind of technology that we have in the Undelete Product, it’s the same perspective that you don’t necessarily have to know where the data was or from where it was deleted. We will give you search functionality so that you can recover it through that type of approach.

Alan:  But, in some cases I’m not really even sure when I find the file if this is the file that I really want to look at. When using the Recycle Bin I have to restore it to the original location and then I have to bring up the program that actually wrote the file and look at it and, "no, that wasn’t the one I wanted either." And then start this all over again. I don’t have to do this in Undelete 2009, do I?

Michael:  No, you do not. What you are going to get is that you are going to be able to search and you bring up a list and then you will be able to preview all the files that you potentially want to get back – and recover only just a specific one or a handful that you actually do.

As you do the actual recovery, you could put those files wherever you want. You could put them back into their original spot, in which case, Undelete will intelligently rename them to make sure that it doesn’t put two files of the same name in the same place, which is not going to obviously fly very well.

Say, if you are recovering them off your D: drive you can move them over to your USB Thumb drive that you plugged them into your computer. So, you have a lot of recovery type functionality with Undelete that’s very unique to that product.

Alan:  Say I have a lot of pictures from my camera that are on my hard drive (and when you are actually moving pictures from your camera to your hard drive it stores in very cryptic names), and now I’ve deleted a sub-directory that went, "Oops!" I don’t need all of the files that were out there; there are only about 5 different really good pictures that I want to save, but there were probably 300-400 pictures out there that I will have to look through. Can I, while I’m in Undelete, click on the picture and then bring it up in a viewer and see it?

Michael:  Yes, absolutely. That will allow you again, to really specify whether that was the picture that I wanted to recover or no, it’s not that one and then get onto the next picture you wanted to take a look at.

Alan:  Oh, I can see where that can save me a world of time. Because, otherwise I have to restore all those and then I have to go through them one at a time and then I have to find the ones that I do want to delete and then delete them again. And now I’m back in the same boat, because now I’ve overwritten the files again!

Michael:  When we’re talking about photographs, one of the things I really bring up with the Undelete product is a particular feature, called Emergency Undelete. It’s a feature that’s really helped me out quite a few times.

Most cameras today are going to be the digital camera and you are going to have 2-4 Gig SD cards or flash cards. You are taking pictures and as you go, one of the benefits of the digital cameras is being able to delete those photos, the ones you didn’t care for, right on the camera, itself. Unfortunately, one of the features of the camera is the "delete all" button, which is right next to the "delete just the picture" button.

Alan:  Yes, I call that the "oops" button.

Michael:  Yes, and that wipes out everything on the SD card. You may just say, oops, I can’t get all those photos back; they are gone; it’s over with! That could be pretty devastating if those are your European Vacation or your honeymoon photographs.

One of the benefits that I have really been able to take advantage of with the Undelete is using the Disk/Emergency undelete feature, which allows you to basically to take that SD card and plug it into your computer and run Emergency Undelete feature on that SD drive or that Flash Card and basically recover all those pictures.

Alan:  Oh, that could save a marriage, I guarantee you! If those were wedding pictures or a favorite vacation and they were gone forever, just because somebody pushes a button, the "oops" button, that could really be a lifesaver, literally.

Michael:  It has saved my life before!

Alan:  Talking about basically "saving your bacon," you also have where when you buy Undelete, you don’t even have to have it installed, you can just put the CD into the computer and with a minimal install to keep from making sure you are not wiping out any of the files that you did delete accidentally and get those back right – right there from the CD, can’t you?

Michael:  Yes, the Emergency Undelete feature which can be run off a CD, you can put it over to your USB Thumb drive, if you downloaded it and plugged that into your computer that you need to recover your data from. As you noted, if you install a product on your C: drive and that is the C: drive from which you delete the data and you need to get it back, there is a potential risk involved of overwriting in that install, the data you wanted to recover. So, it’s very important to run that procedure from another volume, in other words, your USB drive or your CD drive, etc.

Alan:  Because "Murphy" runs rampant at that point. If you have files that are on your computer, Windows is going to use those files and those will be the ones that you really wanted to get back and at this point you don’t want to turn off your computer because the act of booting your computer does all kinds of stuff in the background such as copying files, moving things around and you may wipe out the main files that you are trying to get back. That Undelete Emergency CD is a real lifesaver.

Michael:  Absolutely, you know in one of the normal procedures the rundown is that if you delete something on your C: drive and you need to get it back, is to unplug the network cable and like you said, don’t turn on it off; don’t log on or log off or anything like that. Just let the computer sit there, go grab your CD or your USB drive and do the recovery as soon as possible.

Alan:  Well, now when we are using the Undelete program, especially the 2009, what kind of overhead is going to be occurring? In the past, if we had a program that is sitting there monitoring everything that is happening on our computer, especially looking to see when we deleted a file, it costs some overhead. What are we looking at in the new 2009 Version?

Michael:  The key thing that we looked to solve with this version and what we did to address the overhead part was we added the InvisiTasking Technology, which we have been using at Diskeeper for several years now. InvisiTasking basically, is a software technology that enables a process to run in the background with zero-overhead.

So, we took that technology and we have not applied to Undelete and what Undelete does, thereby you get basically an Undelete product that is basically protecting your files, being able to run particular settings that you select on your data to keep it protected. You don’t have to worry about all this processing putting any impact on the computer or taking away from any of your other day to day activities.

Alan:  Yes, that’s so important, because when we start opening up programs or we start doing anything, say in a spreadsheet, we don’t want to have to sit here and wait for the screen to redraw because there is a process that is hidden behind the scenes that is doing something.

Michael:  There are other technologies out there that say, "Hey, we will run a screen saver at idle times." The problem is just as you pointed out that it may wait until nothing is used before it runs, but as soon as you jump back on the computer and launch a program, it’s going to be there and it’s not going to get out of the way in time. That’s where of the major, major problems that InvisiTasking was designed to solve.

Alan:  Well, one of my pet peeves is that I’m working in Microsoft Word or Excel or Access and I’m working diligently and then I realize that I have made some royal mistakes and I wish I could have gotten back some files that I had saved earlier. Because of the automatic saving feature in say, Microsoft Word, it is has wiped out the files. Can I actually get those back?

Michael:  We do protect you from all the interim versions of the files. One of the success stories we hear pretty frequently is this typical scenario – is that a business person who is on the road and has a PowerPoint file that they are working on, and it may be shortly right up until the meeting and doing some edits to it and accidentally deletes a slide or two in the PowerPoint; they had AutoSave kick in and saved a file then they realized that, "Oh, wow - I have deleted the actual slides that are critical to my presentation," and the Recycle Bin is not going to give them any solution to that.

Undelete would have caught a version of that file every time one of the overwrites occur and the file is saved, it is capturing a version of that file. A user can use Undelete and go back and find what earlier version had the slides, and there is actually a Preview feature in the versioning function of Undelete that allows the user to define, "Hey, that is the PowerPoint version that I had that has the slide that I need," that they can recover it right away and get it back and put their PowerPoint back together they way they needed it.

Alan:  Yes, I don’t have that much trouble with PowerPoint. It’s the spreadsheets that I have the problem with. If you are working on a spreadsheet and you put your cursor into a cell that is actually a formula and start typing, you can do a world of hurt at that point. Because, if wipe out your formula and can’t remember how to put that one back, that’s bad news, isn’t it?

Michael:  Yes, it definitely can be tricky. Once you hit that Save button, the Control Z backup function is not going to work for you, anymore. So, that is again, another place where you can use Undelete to get back that previous version.

Alan:  What are we looking at for the price of Undelete 2009?

Michael:  Well, there are two products. If you do attach your computer to a network and want to recover files from a server, the Undelete Professional Product would be a good fit for you. It is $59.95. I think what we would say for most home users, the best product for them is if they are just looking at protecting the data on their local PC or laptop is the Undelete Home Edition and that runs for $29.95.

Alan:  Where can we find more information about Undelete 2009?

Michael:  You can go to www.undelete.com

Alan:  Michael, we’re out of time. We still have not had a chance to talk about some of the great utility programs that are now included with Undelete 2009. We will have to pick up on this conversation next time.

Michael:  Absolutely. Thanks again, Alan.