What to do when you accidentally delete files January 11, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Tech tips, Tools.trackback
One of my friends called me Saturday night at 11:30 PM in a panic because she had deleted 6 hours of work from her jump drive (thinking she was deleting superfluous files off her laptop). She knew I’d be up and needed someone to talk to because her boyfriend was already asleep. Having been in her position myself I was able to sympathize, but I was under the impression that once files are deleted off a jump drive they are gone. Not true! She called me back about twenty minutes later to inform me she had found a great little program that recovered her deleted files within seconds. The program she used was Undeletemyfiles.
As the software advertises:
“UndeleteMyFiles is a quick and easy way to find and recover deleted media and digital devices. It employs a simplified two-step process that enables you recover any files that used to reside on your system. The interface is very easy to use, just select the device that contains the files that need to be recovered and specify the folder to save the files to.”
What program do you swear by to recover deleted files?
Musings from an overworked translator 
//She called me back about twenty years later //
20 years? How time flies!!!!!!!!!!
Regards,
Dondu N. Raghavan
ROTFL! Note to self: no more blogging after midnight. 🙂 Thanks for the catch, Dondu! I read through the post twice and never caught it…
That’s a good little tool: and free, too. I am — as are most people — a big fan of free and open source software. Luckily, thus far (knock on wood), I have yet to accidentally delete files, but I am definitely bookmarking this program. Thanks for passing it along.
This is a low-tech solution, but before I play around with any important files (for example when I’ve completed a translation and I’m going to tweak the formatting or the table of contents), I e-mail a copy of the file to my Gmail account. That way if I do something horribly wrong and save the changes, I still have the original file easily accessible.
That’s the beauty of Time Machine on Macs – you can delete all the files you like, everything on your HD is saved at regular intervals so it’s easy to get them back.
@Celine – the problem was she was working off her jump drive – not her computer. If she had deleted it off her computer I could have easily recovered it for her by clicking Restore in the Recycle Bin or messing with temporary files. This program restored the files on an external storage medium, which is not as easy to recover. I remember deleting files from a diskette once and they were gone forever. On a personal note, I haven’t forgotten your request about my guest blog post. I’ve gotten busy again this week, but will get to it at the end of the week.
Oh I see! And I just realised that I’ve raved about Time Machine again on your more recent post. Am I turning into one of those annoying Mac evangelists?? Very sorry, feel free to delete my other comment. I’ll go and stand in a corner now.