"How to Recover Those Important Deleted Files"

Complete Transcript of
Jeremy Buck – Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
June 23 2007
Host Alan Ashendorf

Alan:  Has this ever happened to you? You accidentally delete a critical file that a program needs? How do you make sure that you can get that file back? Our guest today, is Jeremy Buck, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Jeremy.

Jeremy:  Thank you Alan. Thanks for having me.

Alan:  All it takes is just that one file that we accidentally delete. Who knows why it gets corrupted and we can shut down the whole operating system, can’t we?

Jeremy:  Often times, yeah. It doesn’t take more than a couple of files to get removed or some how lost and it can make a system, unbootable. There are times that certain things can happen that are kind of out of our control – whether it’s a disk corruption or other unforeseen things. In some of the more important files you have a sort of “lockdowns” that they can’t just simply be deleted. With the introduction of all sorts of new applications and other modifications and patches, it’s difficult to say just how all computers will react.

Alan:  It seems like every time we have a new program that we install on our computer or it gets a new update, it has to install tons of dll’s in the background, ocx’s, Active X controls and any one of those can overwrite something that is very important and the next time we reboot, we may not actually boot.

Jeremy:  It’s certainly possible. Most of the patches and things that are released are certainly done with a certain interface in mind. However, it’s difficult to say from one computer to the next, just how it’s going to be configured and therefore operate; particularly if you’re running any sort of modifications to the system, it’s difficult to say just what files have been changed, and therefore need to stay the same.

Alan:  Plus the fact you have the Windows update. Windows update is supposed to keep your system always running with the latest operating system parts that keep the operating system running. But, if it overwrites something that is the wrong version, it can basically keep us from booting.

Jeremy:  Even just a bad download could certainly lead us down a path like that.

Alan:  Windows is supposed to have the “Recycle Bin”, where if something does get deleted; it gets put in the Recycle Bin, first. But, some of your very important files don’t make it to the Recycle Bin, do they?

Jeremy:  That’s right. Primarily we will capture the files that you manually delete, which for a lot of people, it tends to work out just fine. People can go back and recover things; however, in some cases it’s not enough. And people want a little more functionality and a little more user interface to go back and find exactly what files they are looking at, when they were deleted, and by whom. Those types of things aren’t necessarily available in the Recycle Bin.

Alan:  But, just because it got put into the Recycle Bin, it’s not the easiest thing to get some of these files back out again. We may have terabytes of disk space and it’s very cryptic, at best.

Jeremy:  One of the things that I personally have always had a difficulty with is that it lists all files from a single drive in just one location, without much data on where they came from, when they were removed – and so, it can be a little difficult to sift through all this piecemeal data.

Alan:  We really don’t have any control over the Windows Recycle Bin. When something gets put into the Recycle Bin, it may stay there for a couple of days, a week, or depending on how full your system is, it may just stay in there for just an hour or so.

Jeremy:  For a basic home user, files will appear in there in the Recycle Bin and they will occasionally purge it just get some space back, but there are other scenarios too, where individuals have a drive that has files that are moving in and out constantly. And to have those files captured in the Recycle Bin can sometimes be a bear, because they then add in either a weekly or a monthly type of maintenance where they have to purge that Recycle Bin.

Alan:  Well, you have a solution for this. You have a Product, called Undelete to take over the Recycle Bin, don’t you?

Jeremy:  We layer ourselves over the Recycle Bin. It can capture files just as the Recycle Bin would, but we also add a lot more functionality, a lot more information over what files are saved; how you can go about recovering them; finding out where they were deleted from; who might have deleted – all sorts of information.

Alan:  It’s like having your Recycle Bin on steroids. You can make so many decisions on what actually gets kept; where it gets put, and many more decisions that are very important to keeping you computer up and running the way it supposed to.

Jeremy:  In giving that power back to the user, you can not only increase the potential of keeping your free space higher, you also have the ability to decide just how much free space you would like to have adopted on any particular drive - adopting any captures on one drive, entire, if you would like.

Alan:  Because the Recycle Bin says, “all right, we’re going to capture every thing, unless you hold down the shift key and hit the delete, at the same time and put it in the Recycle Bin, no matter what it is that you deleted.” Here you can say “Don’t recover these .bak files or .tmp files or any other kind of extensions that you do not want to look at.”

Jeremy:  You have the control over just free space is dedicated to saving some of these files. You will probably get more of exactly what is going on in background and what files are being removed.

As you mentioned before, there are certain files that are being deleted without your intervention, you don’t actually have to click delete on them and the operating system does it for you and we actually capture those files.

Alan:  And that’s important because you really don’t know what’s going on with your computer system. You can see that all the files that Windows are constantly being written and overwritten and written and overwritten and you have tons of temporary files – tons of backup files, tons of files in the temp directory and that’s not even talking about your Internet. Every time you go onto the Internet, you have tons of files that come down!

Jeremy:  It’s an awful lot. It doesn’t take more than about 45 minutes on the Net, and scanning a few pages to really start to grow. We actually can manage to capture some of those.

Alan:  And if you have smaller drives, (Let’s say you have a c drive, a d drive) you can set up a special drive just to hold all your recovery files for Undelete. I don’t want to put them on c and d, where they normally reside; I want to put them on a separate drive that has plenty of hard disk space.

Jeremy:  This is one of the great abilities in Undelete. As a lot of people will know, that partitioning a single drive several times that the smaller your c drive gets, the more difficult things can be sometimes. There are still several applications out there that won’t allow you to decide exactly what drive you want to install on. So, by default, it’s installed to c; and as you start losing space, life just gets worse and worse.

The great thing with Undelete is that should you still want to capture files from the c drive, you can enable our capturing on c; however, you can actually have the file, saved on an entirely different drive. That gives you the option to still have file recovery, but to keep the free space on c and for any time that somebody’s done a new patch, all of those files and all those things are saved, directly to the c drive. Running out of space on c is one of the worse ideas in terms of computing.

Alan:  We have been talking about system files; we’ve been talking about temporary Internet files. You also recover files on which we might shoot ourselves in the foot about. For instance, if I’m working on an Excel spreadsheet and I actually overwrite a formula – Excel automatically saves a copy on top of itself. However, you can now get that back for me.

Jeremy:  That’s really a great function right there. We have something called Versioning, particularly where you have Word documents and Excel spreadsheet and Power Point presentations.

These files can be brought up and edited at any point and time. For any body who’s used one of these applications in the past has probably found, you might type out a page or two and then go in and then go in and modify it.

What if you then, later found out that a modification that you made needs to be reverted back to the way it was? Once you have saved and closed the file after editing the second time, it’s usually not just a simple method to go back to the original version. But, with Undelete functionality, we have this Versioning modification, which will save each of the versions that you had; so you can easily go back to point a or point b in order to go back to where you started.

Alan:  When I have been working on a spreadsheet or a word document that I know I am going to make a lot of revision to, it’s like “doc01, doc02, doc03, doc04”. Now, I don’t even have to worry about it, because each time I save, I know it’s actually making a carbon copy of that one and storing it for me. You can go back at any time and find that file.

Jeremy:  Not to mention that you can actually decide how many versions of that file you’d like to keep. For instance, if you know you have a major document (let’s say it’s a legal presentation) – it definitely needs a whole attention to detail. And it’s getting modified constantly; you could save five versions of it, ten versions, a hundred. It really is in your hands to decide how you want Undelete to function in that capacity.

Alan:  And this works with all your Office Products, right?

Jeremy:  This works with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, including Office 2007.

Alan:  One of the special features of Undelete is that it will work inside of a command box or DOS box, whereas Recycle Bin will not capture deleted files.

Jeremy:  That’s right. Any file that happens to be deleted via a DOS prompt, say with a Del command – the Recycle Bin often skips those files. However, we will still be able to capture those, even. So, for any of those old “DOS Heads” like myself that certainly brings an added benefit to the table.

Alan:  Nowadays, it’s so easy to delete a very important file, because you don’t recognize the file name or you read something in an email that says, “oh, you must have a virus, so you need to get rid of this file”, and find out that this is a system file that you just deleted.

Jeremy:  It can be a kind of a difficulty, especially given the mention of the Web. There is a lot great information, don’t get me wrong. But, there’s also some bunk information, especially that refers you to deleting files. Often times, you’re clear, should you follow that advice; but there are times that it could lead you down a very difficult path. And, should you get rid of something that the system really needs. Having a program, like Undelete can really save you time and money.

Alan:  We’ve been talking about deleting files. What about getting them back? In the Windows Recycle Bin, trying to get files back is a royal hassle, because they’re spread out all over the place.

Jeremy:  As we talked about, sifting through the files to locate them – but once you’ve located a file that you would like to get back, there’s little functionality in just where you want it saved, even to determining just originally where it came from. That can be kind of a bear in trying to decide exactly where to place it. You run the risk of overwriting a file that already exists, with the same name.

With Undelete, you can recover a file; decide exactly where you saved; and also have the knowledge of just where it originally came from. So, you could potentially restore it to the original location, where it was essentially born. Or you could restore it to an entirely different place. That gives you the ease of doing a comparison. Let’s say there are two files of a similar name. You could decide then, once you’ve recovered it, “is this the version that I would like; is that the version that I would like?” You can then decide, off the bat.

Alan:  Do I have to worry about cryptic names? It’s actually going to save the file with the same full name that I deleted?

Jeremy:  Absolutely. Exactly how it was shown when it was alive and kicking on the drive.

Alan:  What are looking at as far as the cost of Undelete?

Jeremy:  We do have a Home Version, which is priced at $29.95, on our website. The next step up is primarily considered for a network environment – to work in cooperation with our Undelete Server for a business environment. Undelete Professional is $59.95.

Alan:  If somebody would like to find more information, where can they go?

Jeremy:  I’d have them visit http://www.undelete.com.

Alan:  Jeremy, let me just put you on the spot for a minute. There are a number of undelete products on the market – what makes Diskeeper’s Undelete, different from all the other products?

Jeremy:  I would put it above in just the Versioning and just the general ease of use in the graphical interface – deciding exactly what you would like to have recovered; what you would like to exclude. But, primarily the Versioning is such a great function – especially for maybe a college user environment, where you’re typing up documents and things. Having that ability to go back to where you started or at any other point where you’ve saved a file is definitely a great function.

Alan:  Jeremy, it’s been our pleasure to have you as our guest here on Let’s Talk Computers – showing us how we can get back these very important files that we would have accidentally deleted. And we look forward to having you back on the air again, real soon.

Jeremy:  Thanks so much, Alan. I appreciate it.