I accidentally deleted more than 30 spreadsheet files by typing the command "del *.xls" when I meant to issue the command "del *chase*.xls". So I bought the latest version of a program named Recuva that I had used in the past to successfully recover accidentally deleted files, and when I ran it it stated that 30+ files had been recovered and none of them had been partially overwritten by another file. However all 30+ supposedly "recovered" files consist entirely of binary zeroes. Was this done by the delete command?
A possibly stupid question about the "del" command...
- Thread starter mathewsdw
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Charles Dye
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- May
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Possibly, if you specified /W.... Do you by any chance have DEL aliased?
First off, Charles, I was only dimly aware of the very existence of the "/W" option and no I don't have any alias for the "del" command. Secondly, the "/W" option does not fill the file with binary zeroes, it (from the documentation) "overwrites every byte in the file with different values." But thank you for asking.
Thank you, Rex, that's what I thought. What that means is the "undelete" program I bought and was using (a program named "Recuva") did an <many expletives deleted> job of recovering the files. And it appears that there is no way to recover them since the "recovered" files overwrote the deleted files.
Charles Dye
Super Moderator
- May
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My misunderstanding. Sorry.
I've used that a few times. Once or twice it did succeed in recovering files; other times not. There's just no substitute for having backups.
Charles, you are correct about backups. However the reason (mistakenly) there were no backups is because I really didn't consider them to be permanent files; they were essentially just working storage (because of my bad memory I keep a lot of what are essentially "notes" around).
