jedipi 0 Report post Posted January 31, 2006 Help...Last night, a technical people reinstall my PC.But I have some important document stored in desktop.I know it is a bad idea to save important document in desktop.I just have a backup copy which is backup 2 days ago.How can I get them back???PS. they use norton ghost (not format and install) to restore the system. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jipman 0 Report post Posted January 31, 2006 I think the Norton Ghost was the kill here. As far as I know (read some stuff about it), Ghost only backs up entire drives, that means that the exact data that is on the drive at that moment is backupped. This also means that the entire partition/drive is filled with data (wheter usefull data or null bytes) when you restore the image. This means that the data you wanted to restore is also overwritten, although there are expensive ways to recover documents even like this, it's waaaay out of the league of us regular computer users and it has to be done by some specialized company for some insane high price.So, unless the document was very valuable, you should consider it lost. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0 Report post Posted January 31, 2006 If they're used GHOST, as jipman said - your WHOLE PARTITION was rewritten from an original master image. So all data you had prior to that has been effectively wiped out. Your only hope is whatever manual backup you had from 2 days back. A Recommendation This is what I learnt the hard way after loosing a lot of documents many times . What I do now, is right-click on My Documents, go to properties and move the actual My Documents physical folder to another partition. That way I can safely save everything in My Documents - but the files travel to another partition and get saved there. Whenever I need to wipe out windows and re-install, I can safely erase whole of C: drive and re-do it with Ghost or normal installation. All my personal files are still safely tucked away in another folder in that other partition - totally untouched. DO THAT - believe me, it'll save you from massive amounts of headache later on..and any time you re-install, you don't have to go like - "Oh $hit, I forgot to backup my documents!!!!" Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jedipi 0 Report post Posted January 31, 2006 Thank you for your information..Damn it, that means I lost 2 days work.Those documents are valuable but it is not worthwhile to pay a specialized company for recovery.so, what I can do is redo the work and treat those 2 days work as the cost. :)and..thank you miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG, you just gave mea tip. thank you very much. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
yordan 10 Report post Posted January 31, 2006 Damn it, that means I lost 2 days work.Nope ! Ghost's obvious goal is backing up a whole disk because everything is safe. However, you can selectively restore files. Depending on the ghost version, it's named ghost explorer or ghost image browser. With ghost explorer or ghost browser, you open your backup image file (usually on a CD), and you see your files, and you copy them back to your hard disk.So, ghost backup is the correct way, and backing up a whole disk allows then reading some small separated text files and get them back.Regardsyordan Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
wutske 0 Report post Posted February 3, 2006 With some luck you can actualy just get the data back.Norton Ghost probably wipes the whole disk and the puts data on it. Since the ghost is small than what was probably already on the disk, the outer zones of your hdd won't be overwritten, meaning that the file might be recoverable using some simple software.Now, there is a catch, it might have saved the documents somewhere in the beginning of the hdd platter because there was some free space due to fragmentation. I just suggest you to run some kind of recover software. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
finaldesign1405241487 0 Report post Posted February 3, 2006 hi!this is just a quick tip, maybe to try with final recover software, I had some luck recently with this software, and you can evaluate for some time, so I think it should be enough just to restore your data.Anyway, you'll see, when you will use recovery software, a % of recover possible, so if it's anything less than 100% sucessful recovery, you will probably get distorted and corrupted data, that wont work right. If we talk about images, you will probably be able to open them, but some pixels or even some parts of an image will be corrupted... anything else from word documents to any other file format will be probably unusable. But give it a try. It's better than nothing. I wish you all the luck with recovery p.s. And one more tip! If you do recovery of data, select another phsycal drive, where you want your recovered data saved, if you recover on a same drive you will corrupt your data, and probably loose any and every chance of sucessful recover. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
yordan 10 Report post Posted February 3, 2006 I would like to emphazise that you can recover single file from your ghost backup. You used ghost backup in order to do the previous backup, you still have it. So, after the reinstall of your system, simply use the ghost browser tools, they will look inside your old backup and retrieve the single files you need off your backup. It's as simple as that!RegardsYordan Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jedipi 0 Report post Posted February 5, 2006 That ghost image is a backup of a flesh installed system.So, my work was just lost... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
yordan 10 Report post Posted February 5, 2006 Of course, you can retrieve your work from a backup if the backup was done after your files creation. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
