File Recover Software - Windows?

[mykalberta]

I have a user who is used to Windows 7 merge, he figured it would work on XP but instead of reading replace he assumed it would merge. Obviously it didnt.

Does anyone have any suggestions on any file recover software? I donwloaded a few ones off the web just to test on my computer and they dont seem to work.

Thank you.

[MickMcGeough]

I shift-deleted about a thousand pics & videos from a trip to China a couple months back and Recuva restored all but a couple of them.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

It's dependent on that portion of your drive not having been written to after deletion (like most recovery software).

[photon]

Yeah that was the one I would recommend too.

Though I'm not sure what you mean by merge. You mean where a user tried to copy one directory to another of the same name? And instead of combining them like Windows 7 would it just overwrote the old directory?

In that case an undelete program might work, but I'm not positive what the OS is actually doing with the file system in that case. Recovery programs work because deleted files aren't really deleted, they're just deallocated, until they are physically overwritten the files are actually still there, and recovery programs look for the bit patterns and find them.

But in this case I'm not sure what the replace does, I would think that the OS just deallocates the directory being replaced and renames the existing files (if it's being moved on the same drive), so if that's the case it might work (assuming no new data has been written to the drive, if new data has been written there's a chance it's overwritten the removed files).

If the files were copied on the same drive rather than moved, or copied/moved from another drive the new files would have been written to the drive and there's a chance that that would have overwritten the old files.

[mykalberta]

He was used to Windows 7 merge folders that doesnt exist on Windows XP

He had a folder on his desktop called X. He had an older version of the folder X on his network drive, he copied that version to his desktop and assumed XP had the Windows 7 merge function but XP doesnt so it asked him do you want to replace and he said yes.

[photon]

The OS might first copy the files and then when the copy is complete remove the old files and change the file allocation table to point to the new ones. If that's the way it does it there's a chance, but I'm not positive as to how the OS does it so I can't say for sure.. the longer the PC runs though the more chance that the old files (if they even still exist in the empty space on the drive) will be overwritten with normal temporary file and file creation activity.