Very specific file recovery question

I work at an email marketing company and one of my friends here is a programmer. Unfortunately she lost all her work today in a stupid accident. She wanted to make one project to hold all the code she had written in the past month. she created it and then realized that she wanted a PHP project. so she deleted the BLANK one she made and then everything she had done was gone. Somehow it linked to everything she did and removed it. Not put it in the recycle bin, just removed it.

is there any way to recover these files?

Thanks for help even if you try.

 

Had your friend been regularly saving her work in progress, so that files were actually written to disk? If so, and if nothing else suffices, don't use the disk; instead, remove it from the system, stick it in an internal closure, plug it into another system and use a file recovery app to see if you can find and recover the files in question.

 

Have her try Recuva: http://www.recuva.com/

It's a free, easy to you file recovery program. It isn't too powerful, but if the file was recently deleted (hence likely to not have been written over) then it should be recoverable.

 

thanks for the help, but IT here has a stranglehold on our computers, and installing software doesn't seem to be something they want engineers to be able to do. Is there anyway she can do it if they don't let us install software?

 

Well if you can secretly pull that drive out of the computer and read it from another, than you can still use Recuva... If not, then the only software I'm aware of that doesn't actually install itself is TestDisk & PhotoRec. They are more powerful programs but are a bit difficult to use and they don't have any GUI to speak of. PhoroRec will be the program to use, unfortunately I'm not sure if it has added the ability to recover only one file. The last time I used it, it would recover everything it could, which will take some time and require that you have a lot of extra drive space available. Also it renames the files usually, so it will be a pain to find the one she's looking for. However it should work... It runs from an EXE, so you will need that privilege. It won't install anything though.

Photorec really is going to be a pain though... I really suggest you guys either pull the drive or contact the IT department about allowing you to install the software. It would save you a lot of aggravation I hope.

 

Would save alot, the issue is that she already went up to IT and they don't give a sh*t.

 

Do they have backups her stuff could be restored from, or do the IT folks just play WoW all day?

 

If we decide to use testdisk & photorec then what kind of damage could it potentially cause toe the machine? it was a pretty new machine. only a month in use and not many files deleted.

also, how long would it take?

 

IT plays wow all day, they don't care

 

It won't do any damage. Potential = 0% as far as I know of. I've used it dozens of times.

It could take between 15 minutes to 2 hours depending on the size of the drive. And then another hour of sifting through the recovered files to find the one you're looking for (as it will likely rename the file). So it will be a big pain... But it will work. Eventually.

If you have the know-how & ability/right to do so, pulling the drive and running on a machine you have administrative privileges on would be so much easier. Recuva will only take a few minutes.

 

Ok, i'll give it a try, can you give me a secure link which i can download it from.

 

I'm not sure if by secure link you mean https or just one you can trust, but this is the programmers download site.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-6.10.win.zip

As far as I know there isn't an https download of it