File Undelete When Overwritten

Overwriting a file, can I get it back?

 

In a recent data loss nightmare I had a customer call and state that they had a file on a jump drive, as well as a copy on the desktop. They used the process of moving the most current file to the jump drive to get the excel file back and forth from work. In a most unfortunate turn of events the customer had accidentally copied the OLDER version over the newer version.

 

His question to me was if we had some kind of software that would help him recover the file. The answer is no, there is no software that can fix this problem; once you overwrite a file it is gone. All of the information we would use to get to the file has been over written with the older file. There are a couple exceptions to this.

 

One would be QuickBooks files; Intuit may be able to still harvest some data from your drive. Another situation is a large data base file, especially if the one you copy over it is much smaller, a data recovery company like ours may be able to pull records off. For the most part though I would recommend you don’t OVERWRITE files when copy from one media to another just # them and once you are sure you have the right data delete the previous version. This tip will have a ton of headaches.