How in the Tech

Recover Lost Files with Pandora Recovery

By Adam Myers ⋅ October 14, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Backup, File Management

There are two types of computer users in the world today: those that backup and those that have never lost an important document. I would consider myself very diligent in regards to maintaining proper and up to date backups of everything that is important. I have both on and off site copies with both repositories automated so I don’t really have to think about it. However, I have a confession to make. The webhost for How in the TECH recently migrated the site to a new server which resulted in a bit of downtime recently. Fair enough, I was giving sufficient warning on the outage and it isn’t the end of the world if HitT remains offline for an evening as the work commences. As a fellow IT worker, I also understand migration plans rarely go off without a hitch and this one was no different; the outage window of only a few hours crept into the greater part of a day. Annoying sure, but for hosting that only costs a few bucks a month I have little room to complain. Except, when the site was finally reachable I quickly discovered I had lost the last two weeks of posts! Worse, I soon learned that while HostMonster creates backups of it’s clients sites, they are not at all guaranteed! You get what you pay for I suppose?

I do backup the SQL database daily, though mostly for my own protection and piece of mind. I do not, however, backup the entire contents of my site – it’s quite large actually! So while it was easy enough to reproduce the text-based content of the last two weeks of posts, I was still without all the uploaded photos. This is when I turned to an application called Pandora Recovery.

Pandora Recovery is a free file recovery tool for Windows that can restore files thought previously to be permanently deleted. I do most of my updates of the site from one PC so I thought this would be worth a shot trying. You see, when a file is deleted from your PC it isn’t actually removed from the physical harddisk, rather the pointer in the filesystem is merely dereferenced. Until the space is actually needed on your harddrive, the file is likely recoverable by software such as Pandora Recovery.

Pandora Recovery can:

• Scan all Windows filesystems, including FAT32 and NTFS, within Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista.
• Search for deleted files by name, size, creation date, or last accessed date.
• Using Surface Scan technology, Pandora can even recover files where the MFT table is missing.

With Pandora Recovery I was able to recover most of my uploaded photos. Your results may vary but the best results typically center around files very recently deleted. This is a handy tool that I’ll keep installed; you never know when it will save the day!