Search and Recover Lost Microsoft Word Documents

If you type a lot and are using Microsoft Word as your text processor, you've made the right choice. Microsoft Word is arguably the most powerful, feature-rich and handy to use by complete beginners and advanced professionals altogether. It has unparalleled strengths in creating, formatting and modifying all types of documents, from simple memos to complex reports. When you save a document in one version of Microsoft Word, it can usually be opened in a different version without problems.

But what if the document you've spent so much time on just disappears? What can happen to it? First and most possible, you can simply delete it yourself by an accident. You might think that this would never happen to you because there is the Windows Recycle Bin, and even if it's accidentally emptied, you'll just go to the Internet and get a free undelete utility. Well, it does not work this way...

Here's what happened to my wife a couple of weeks ago. She was working on a chapter for her Ph.D. thesis, and sent it to a professor for review. Usually, she gets back a document with embedded comments by email. She saves an attachment from the email, overwriting the old one, and deletes it from her Hotmail account. But this time, things went the wrong way. She received her chapter by email and replaced the old document with the new one, only to find out that her supervisor got a copy of the old one! She opened the Recycle Bin and found out that the document was never deleted but instead, it was replaced, so it wasn't even in the Recycle Bin. She tried to find an email that she had sent earlier, but Hotmail does not store sent messages. She asked me to do something to recover the document, and I downloaded a couple of free undelete programs, only to find that there were several dozens of deleted documents with that same name. So, I failed to recover the most recent revisions.

This story did have a happy ending, as my wife's supervisor discovered the latest version of the document on her computer. But one thing that I learned from this story was never to rely on the Recycle Bin and free data recovery tools. To prevent this kind of things from happening, I decided to look for commercial alternatives.

I quickly discovered that there are many data recovery offers on the market. Most products mention recovering deleted or corrupted files and documents, and some tools promise recovery of files even from crashed or damaged hard drives. There are basically two types of data recovery products. They are different in how they find the lost files, and what they do to recover them. Simpler products, such as those free undelete utilities that I tried in my quest, deal with the file system. They simply scan the file system looking for records of files that are marked "deleted", and clear the mark. This is a fast and easy way to recover lost files, and it works sometimes, especially if you deleted a file just a minute ago.

These products, as I discovered from my own experience, fail to do their job if you have a complex case or if you are recovering a failed hard drive, or if the file system is damaged. If your document has been deleted some time ago or overwritten with another file, chances of successful recovery using these tools are slim.

The other type of products deals with your hard drive directly instead of scanning the file system, but such products are slow and expensive. I also found them extremely complex to use because they don't show the names of the deleted documents, let alone their content. These tools don't have access to the file system, and are unaware of the files' names, showing documents as "document_001.doc" at best, but more likely you'll see something like "~ocume1" instead of a proper name.

Then I found DiskInternals Word Recovery. It does an amazing thing by combining the best of the other data recovery products, while offering unprecedented efficiency dealing specifically with Microsoft Word documents such as .DOC and .RTF. It scans the file system and learns about the files that were deleted the way the free undelete tools do. Then, it goes further and scans the hard drive directly to locate Microsoft Word documents that are not shown in the file system. It uses a list of file signatures to detect the beginning and end of Microsoft Word documents, and extracts their contents and metadata on the fly. This method is said to work even if your hard drive is half dead!

DiskInternals Word Recovery synchronizes the results obtained with the file system scan with the results obtained by accessing the hard disk directly, presenting the most complete list of recoverable Word documents along with their file names, metadata and contents, and yields the best ratio of recoverability.

If I wanted to get the latest version of any Word document, I would simply use "On the Fly" filters that allow to only display files with specific title, written by specific author, or the files that contain certain text, are of a certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version of DiskInternals Word Recovery allows full file preview to ensure you recover exactly what you want, and that you can recover the document in full with no garbage or missing parts.

DiskInternals Word Recovery if not free, but I for one am done with the free recovery tools. You can download and try an evaluation version for free from http://www.diskinternals.com/ , and only purchase if you see that DiskInternals Word Recovery does indeed deliver what others just offer: the complete recovery of your lost Microsoft Word documents.

Recover Deleted Excel Spreadsheets

Today, Microsoft Excel clearly possesses dominant market share in the spreadsheet product market. Its proprietary XLS format is compatible throughout the range of Microsoft Excel versions, and is a de facto standard at home and in the office. It is hard to overestimate the number of spreadsheets and the amount of important data stored in XLS files all over the world. But what if your computer's hard drive fails and you lose access to all spreadsheets? Or what if you simply delete an XLS spreadsheet on which you've spent hours of work?

Don't panic! Everything may not be lost just yet, and you may be able to recover all information without a sweat. To maximize your chances of successful recovery, minimize your activity on the computer where the lost files were. While you cannot be completely sure that Windows does not write anything on the disk that stores your lost files, the goal is essentially to limit disk write operations until you get back all important data from that disk. Any data that's written on a disk that contains deleted or inaccessible data on it can, and probably will, overwrite the deleted files on the disk and destroy information that was stored in them.

Anecdotally, one of the worst things you can do is looking for a tool that will undelete or recover your XLS files, installing and trying out such tools in action. On a typical PC, any Web page you open in a browser will cause several file writes to a hard drive, reducing your chances of successful data recovery. Any program that you download or install is also written to your hard disk. Finally, as not all products are equal, running a wrong type of data recovery application bears an unacceptably high risk of losing your lost Excel spreadsheets forever.

DiskInternals Excel Recovery is designed specifically to find and recover Microsoft Excel XLS spreadsheets safely and securely, no matter how badly your hard drive or the file system are damaged. If you simply deleted an XLS file, DiskInternals Excel Recovery will look up the file system to find all XLS files that were deleted recently, and test each file for the possibility of successful recovery. In bad cases or if your hard drive crashed or the file system is corrupt, DiskInternals Excel Recovery will scan entire hard drive's surface in order to locate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that aren't marked in the file system. The product uses a list of signatures associated with Microsoft XLS file format in order to detect precisely the beginning and end of each and every Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on your hard disk, extracts and validates their contents and metadata on the fly. This method works even on disks that are completely inaccessible in Windows!

The product matches the results obtained with the file system scan against those obtained by scanning surface of the hard disk, and displays the complete list of recoverable Excel spreadsheets along with their file names, metadata and contents, giving you the best possibility of successful recovery.

If you only need to recover the latest version of an Excel spreadsheet, you can use "On the Fly" filters that allow to only showing XLS files with specific title, created by specific author, or the files that contain certain text, are of a certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version of DiskInternals Excel Recovery allows full file preview to ensure that you can recover exactly the files you need.

Download and try an evaluation version for free from http://www.diskinternals.com/. You only need to purchase when you see for yourself that DiskInternals Excel Recovery provides you complete recovery of your XLS files in your particular circumstances.

Disk Recovery Wizard by WizardRecovery.com

Important files disappeared after a system failure? Windows crashed while you were editing a Word document? Can’t access a hard drive after a power outage? Unerase deleted files, recover lost documents and repair inaccessible disks and partitions on your own! Using proper disk recovery tools, you can do exactly what data recovery professionals do to recover your disk and data. Disk Recovery Wizard by http://wizardrecovery.com offers a full set of tools to successfully repair corrupted partitions and return inaccessible drives back to use.

Not sure if you can recover your disk and data yourself? Disk Recovery Wizard works completely automatically after asking you a few simple questions about the disks and files you want to recover. Its intuitive, wizard-based interface conveniently guides you through the recovery process. Being simple to use, Disk Recovery Wizard is not a simple tool. The advanced disk and data recovery algorithms make it one of the most powerful data recovery tools on the market. Any data recovery application can undelete the deleted Recycle Bin items, but only a few are able to do it after you do it over and over again. Disk Recovery Wizard carefully reconstructs your files and documents to make sure you can actually use the recovered documents, pictures and archives even if some parts of them have been overwritten with other data.

Still not convinced? Disk Recovery Wizard does not make false promises, offering you a complete Live Preview of your deleted files and documents before you pay. Just download the free evaluation version, scan your disk and select any file to see its contents immediately.

Are you on the edge of technology? Using the newest and latest hardware? Disk Recovery Wizard fully supports the huge disks of today formatted with any version of FAT or NTFS file systems in any version of Windows since the ancient Windows 95 to the newest Vista. A fully automatic data recovery is easily possible from local hard drives as well as digital photo cameras, memory cards, SD, CompactFlash, Memory Stick and USB drives. Get your copy now http://wizardrecovery.com.

Data Recovery Tips

Data recovery becomes necessary when your hard drive, memory card or USB flash card fail, and you have no backup available. This article gives an idea on the necessary steps and precautions during the data recovery process.

Before attempting the recovery, you must be aware that the data cannot always be retrieved. In case of a physical failure of a hard disk such as the infamous "click of death" situation, you won't be able to do much good to the hard drive except bring it to the recovery experts. Modern hard drives, however, are complex yet reliable pieces of electronics. They rarely fail for no reason, at least on a physical level.

Logical corruption prevails with the complex operating systems, buggy software, malicious or careless acts of the end-users, malware and viruses. Power failures and computer hardware malfunctions also account for many cases of corrupted hard drives and lost data.

The logical corruption can be dealt with at home. Provided that you have the right data recovery tools, you'll be able to do it yourself without any special skills.

Be aware that the data recovery process is a lengthy one. You'll need plenty of time and enough space on a working, non-corrupted hard disk to facilitate the recovery. Before you begin, make sure that you restrict any write operations onto the damaged disk. If you don't have data recovery already installed on your computer, don't save or install the data recovery product onto the corrupted drive. Instead, use a different drive letter, a flash memory card or a USB drive. Even a flash card from your digital camera can be able to store the data recovery tool!

The choice of a proper data recovery tool is a very important one. If you have no previous experience in recovering data, choose one that offers maximum level of automation for an inexperienced uses. It's a good idea to make sure that the tool you pick allows saving a copy of the damaged disk onto a healthy one in order to work on a backup copy instead of operating the live disk. Mareew Data Recovery by http://mareew.com is a good choice for the inexperienced user.

Further data recovery steps depend on the data recovery software that you choose for the job. If you settle with Mareew Data Recovery, there's not much to talk about. Mareew Data Recovery can optionally create a backup copy of the damaged disk (I highly recommend that you do so), and performs all recovery operations on the copy instead of the original. If something goes wrong, you still have the source hard disk in its original condition; just make another copy and try again.

The data recovery process is pretty straightforward with Mareew Data Recovery. You get a step-by-step wizard that guides you through the recovery process. Even if you don't read the prompts except the choice of the damaged disk if you have more than one in your system, and simply click the 'Next' button several times, you will be able to recover the damaged disk!

Mareew Data Recovery is able to fix the most complex issues with modern hard disks. Corrupted file systems, bad partition tables, FAT or NTFS failures are not a problem. Most importantly, Mareew Data Recovery values your data more than the integrity of the system structures. You'll have a chance to save your documents, digital pictures and archives from the damaged drive before attempting the recovery. All in all, a highly recommended tool.

Try it free at http://mareew.com/data_recovery/data_recovery.php

Data Recovery and Securing Data On Computers

Data recovery or Datenrettung is the process by which the data is recovered from damaged or inaccessible storage media. Data recovery is done from storage media like CD´s, DVD´s, Floppies, Hard disks, Magnetic tapes etc. There are two reasons due to which the data becomes inaccessible. They are logical damage and physical damage to the storage media.

Physical damage to storage media can occur in many ways. Magnetic tapes can break, get crumpled or dirt may settle on the tapes. CD´s and DVD´s can have scratches or the metallic layer may get damaged. Magnetic heads in hard disks can crash or motors may fail. The floppy is notorious for failing frequently due to bending, overheating, cold, dust etc.

There are other reasons like fires, electrical surges etc that can cause data to become inaccessible or lost. There are many methods by which data can be recovered from magnetic media or optical media. The methods most commonly used are Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM), Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM), Magnetic Force Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) etc.

In these methods a sharp magnetic tip is placed closed to the surface to be analyzed. It interacts with the stray magnetic field. An image of the data is generated and then repairs are carried out on logical damage and thus the data is recovered. Many companies carry out data recovery.

Logical damage is the damage to the file system. It is not physical but a software problem and also tells us that we need to be cautious and have a quality system for data recovery, datenrettung. It generally occurs due to power cuts, system crashes etc preventing file system structures from being written resulting in file system being left in an inconsistent state.

Logical damage is more common than physical damage. This may cause strange behavior like infinitely recurring file directories, loss of data, system crashes, hard disks reporting negative space etc. The end result is that the operating system cannot mount the file system.

Most operating systems come with repair facilities like, Linux has fcsk utility, Mac has disk utility and Windows has chkdisk facility. There are other specialized programs available which have better repair facilities than the operating systems.

There are also other systems called journaling file systems like NTFS, EFS (used in Windows XP), ext3 and xfs which can be reverted back to their earlier consistent state. These file systems reduce the amount of data loss.

Data back up is the best way to prevent loss of data and it´s the most common system for data recovery, datenrettung. The simplest method is to keep data on drives on which the operating system is not loaded. The other method is to write data on magnetic tapes, CD’s or DVD´s or have online backup.

Backups are very important for databases. Data backup is of 3 types. Full backup means backing up all data. Incremental backup means backing up of only the files that have changed. Differential backup is a mixture of these two. There is another method called continuous data protection in which when data is written to a disk, it is also written to another computer in a network.

Most private persons with a computer do nothing in advance, they just use their computers. Too late, when an incident has happened they learn about data recovery or datenrettung.