Magically Disappearing Files - What I Can Do About It

April 17, 2000 - I know, it's seems like I'm always repeating myself, but this time it really is "getting to be that time again". This time, it's finals (or close to it)!

Yes, the anxiety is getting more pronounced; people are camping out in the labs, and trying to sneak in before the labs open while the custodians are trying to do their jobs. The amount of caffeine spilled in the labs has doubled, and the tables are looking pretty icky. And the number of students who have lost files to fickle zip disks has doubled.

Okay, more than doubled, since I haven't had many problems in the last two weeks, since updating the Iomega drivers (see Article 7), and we had 2 serious problems Friday. Luckily, in both cases I was able to restore the file. But, it wasn't easy or quick, and I wouldn't have been able to do it at all if it weren't for a handy little utility called Norton Unerase.

Here is the situation.

A student came running in frantically explaining that her file was missing from her Zip disk. She had copied it to the disk, and everything had appeared normal. She ejected the disk, and inserted it again, to make sure that the file was there, and it was gone.

Now, those of you who have no interest whatsoever in the shear "fun-ness" of troubleshooting (I am being slightly sarcastic here), can skip down to the tips section of this article, while I explain how this was fixed.

Okay, those of you who are interested in how this problem was solved can continue reading.

After rebuilding the desktop of the disk, it was obvious from the fact that I didn't see the file magically reappear that this would be no ordinary rescue mission. I checked the machine that she had used the night before, as any file that wasn't trashed by the user would end up in the Lost & Found folder. She had been saving to the desktop of the machine, so this seemed like an easy solution to the problem.

Except that the file wasn't there. At all. Just an alias (that's a shortcut to you Windows users) sitting forlornly in the Trash.

After coming to the conclusion that this poor Illustrator file was pretty much toast, I decided to pull out the big guns. Unerase – that industrial-strength utility that can save just about anything (if you have the patience to use it). I booted from the Norton CD, told it what type of file to look for (Illustrator, erased files), and waited about 20 minutes while it found 41 files which it then recovered perfectly.

Yes, it recovered them perfectly. I am not joking. It just takes awhile.

You see, when a file is deleted, all that is deleted is the note in the directory of the disk that tells what the file is, how large it is, and where it is stored on the disk. The reference to the file is deleted, but the file is still there, which is basically how utilities like Unerase work. The file is untouched until something else is written to the disk. Since the student stopped immediately and did not save or copy anything else to the disk, her files were untouched.

What to do when you think you've accidentally erased or lost a file:

1. Do not panic. Check the trash can or recycle bin on the computer. Is the file there? If so, drag it out. Files are not deleted from the trash until you specifically give the command to delete them. This is the easy solution.

2. Check to make sure that you didn't accidentally save the file in a different folder (directory). Use the computer's Find command to do this. Type the name of the file. If the file is present, you will be able to see where it is located, and copy it to the correct location (your zip disk or floppy).

3. If none of this works, immediately eject your disk and bring it to me for recovery. Do not copy anything else to the disk. You could overwrite what you want to recover.

What is troubling to me is the fact that this student involved did not delete this file - it was deleted through an apparent fault in the directory structure of her zip disk. You can avoid this by making sure to copy your work file to the computer's hard drive, and work from that file. When finished, copy the file to your zip or floppy disk, eject the disk, and reinsert it to make sure that the copy is actually there.

If you do all of this, and make sure to carry a zip and a spare for backups, you will always give yourself the best chance to recover files in the event of a crash.

–J

Jennifer Nieland is the lab coordinator for the College of the Design student computer labs and is convinced that things like this happen just to make her crazy!