The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

HELP! data recovery advice

I just overwrote an important file, and I'm not sure if I can recover it. I was using CoolEdit to edit some important music file, and I accidentally made a bad change, so I selected REVERT TO SAVED.

So you would think if I hit YES on the next dialog box, it would LOSE the changes and actually "revert to saved". But NO, the way it's implemented, is that it closes the file and reopens it -- and closing asks: do you want to save your changes? with YES as the default.

Doh!!! What retarded design. And you can't undo after saving either, I guess.

So I just did this, and didn't touch the computer, so hopefully it didn't actually overwrite the file on disk? Can anyone suggest some sort of software that will recover this?

But if I install the software, there's a chance that it ITSELF will overwrite my old file, no? And hopefully leaving Windows on won't overwrite it with some background processes... and I think the swap file is "statically allocated" as well.

Please help I'm desperate, this was an important music file!

Roose
Sunday, December 28, 2003

By the way, this on a Windows 2000 system with FAT32, not NTFS.

thanks!

Roose
Sunday, December 28, 2003

Check whatever temp directory cool edit uses. My wave editing program used to routinely crash but leave the wave in the temp directory where I could recover it.

I guess I don't need to tell you to back up important work before you start editing it. ;)

Matthew Lock
Sunday, December 28, 2003

Your might try the popular undelete program found at http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/

Preferably using another computer (not the one containing the deleted file), download it and unzip it. The result is a single executable which can be run from a floppy, no install needed.

This was designed to recover deleted files; depending on exactly what happened in the scenario you describe, it might help.

Spider
Sunday, December 28, 2003

Cool Edit uses lots and lots of temp files so that almost no changes are permenant. Though once you've saved the file and closed the program, I don't think those temp files will still exist.

You should probably ask in an Audio forum.

www.MarkTAW.com
Sunday, December 28, 2003

I can recommend OnTrack EasyRecovery for this job, it's saved me a number of times in the past. I have never used it with CoolEdit, though.

http://www.ontrack.co.uk

Anon
Sunday, December 28, 2003