Recovered Deleted Data help Please

[leon]

Hi Guys
Some time ago I posted a thread about my sisters business partner deleting all business files from the work laptop.

After a suggestions from myself and you guys she took the machine to a data recovery place and to make a long story short the files were recovered and loaded to a external drive.

She is not really handy with laptops and finds that she cannot open the files and has asked me for some assistance, which is difficult as i am in QLD and she is in VIC.

She says the machine asked her how do you want to open this file or do you want to look up a program to open this file, or something to that effect.

I said to her maybe your computer dose not have a program to handle this type of file, but she dose not know what type of file it is.

I suggested she takes it back to the place that recovered the data and ask that question, she will do that today.

I ask is there any other way of opening the files, or is it as simple as downloading the correct program, and if that is the case how dose she find that out on her machine.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Leon

[ZeroID (Brent)]

I had a similar situation a few years back. The files come back recovered but without a file extension which indicates what application is the correct one, Excel, Word, etc etc.
In my case they were all Excel files but your friends data is probably a mixture of various file types. Unless they are still in recognisable named structures, folders etc it's a long process to add extension names and test each file with an appropriate application. He could open each file with Notepad and see if the header information gives a clue as to what file type each one is.
To put it bluntly it is a slow and laborious task to sort them out. Took me a few days for sure.

[leon]

Thanks Brent, that is what I am looking for but as you say it may be a long process.

Leon

[sil (Steve)]

have a read of this article. File recovery can often result in losing filenames and their extensions (as the process involves raw reading of the 1s and 0s on a hard drive directly, which is seperate from an operation through the operating system so the process creates a new binary file but to the end user they don't know what the file actually is. The process of filetype identification is up to the client to sort out. Its a massively time consuming process. This is where your friend is at now. Its part of the reason I no longer offer my services to people except in rare cases any more. Data recover can not be estimated how long it'll take or how successful it'll be and a drive full of hex numbered binary files and no directory structures means the client becomes a pest more often than not and its not worth the money or stress.

Data recovery services do NOT give you back a hard drive with everything looking to you like it did before the drive died (generally I can quickly tell the user caused the damage regardless what they claim).

[leon]

Thanks Sil, wow it is getting more complicated than i had first thought.

Leon

[sil (Steve)]

hence the costs, its not a case of "buy this one click AAAA recovery program!!!!!" and you get all your data back. simple recovery programs *can* recover depending on how the data was lost. but its an exploratory process and can even require a clean room environment and transplant circuit boards and drive platters. so yes it could take 30min and everything comes back looking the way it used to or it could take 30+days and look like a random bunch of useless binary files. depends on how valuable the data is how much effort you put into it but you can make matters worse by trying to do it yourself too. from a business standpoint it can be tedious to deal with plebs who cant comprehend any of this but for say a corporations financial records on a dead drive its a no brainer to wear the cost and time in a recovery process. of course no corporation these days would have critical data on a single drive in a single location. a criminal organisation might though and forensic data recovery is another order of magnitude more complicated again. way out of my league.

[JA]

Of general interest on the subject of data recovery and some of the ins & outs ......

Best
JA

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[leon]

Thank you all for your suggestions,

Leon