Recovering overwritten excel files

[witch]

Am I right in thinking that this is almost impossible?

A teacher has managed to overwrite her reports with two new ones - goodness knows how. This was done on her home computer and USB stick so no backup or shadow copy.

 

I have tried Recuva and Photorec to no avail. Checked her laptop for temp files.

 

Her own laptop is Windows 8 and her school one, which she plugged the USB stick into yesterday to look at the files, is Windows 7. She is convinced that her school laptop corrupted the stick in some way

[sted]

by overwritten do you mean shes altered them in a way she diddnt mean to or saved another file over the top with the same name?

[Arreks]

She is convinced that her school laptop corrupted the stick in some way

 

..Yeah....... of course it did.....

 

 

If she saved over the top of it, it's pretty much unrecoverable afaik. There's a difference between deleting something and completely overwriting data unfortunately.

[LosOjos]

Am I right in thinking that this is almost impossible?

A teacher has managed to overwrite her reports with two new ones - goodness knows how. This was done on her home computer and USB stick so no backup or shadow copy.

 

This would have been your only real hope I suspect... as the files have been overwritten, it's likely made it impossible for any recovery software to retrieve them (these work on the principle that 'deleted' files aren't actually gone, that area of the storage is just marked as free to overwrite to the OS - by saving over them, the are of storage they already existed in has almost certainly been overwritten with the new versions)

 

Her own laptop is Windows 8 and her school one, which she plugged the USB stick into yesterday to look at the files, is Windows 7. She is convinced that her school laptop corrupted the stick in some way

 

Extremely unlikely the school laptop is in any way to blame. Corruption is common on USB drives, particularly when they get repeatedly pulled from drives whilst still in use. So, it may well be corrupted, but it's through misuse, not the laptop's fault.

 

I think the only thing you can do is reinforce the importance of backups and not storing important data on flash drives long term (certainly never have a flash drive store your only copy of anything you don't want to lose!)

[sted]

This would have been your only real hope I suspect... as the files have been overwritten, it's likely made it impossible for any recovery software to retrieve them (these work on the principle that 'deleted' files aren't actually gone, that area of the storage is just marked as free to overwrite to the OS - by saving over them, the are of storage they already existed in has almost certainly been overwritten with the new versions)

 

 

 

Extremely unlikely the school laptop is in any way to blame. Corruption is common on USB drives, particularly when they get repeatedly pulled from drives whilst still in use. So, it may well be corrupted, but it's through misuse, not the laptop's fault.

 

I think the only thing you can do is reinforce the importance of backups and not storing important data on flash drives long term (certainly never have a flash drive store your only copy of anything you don't want to lose!)

 

or suggest she uses onedrive (iirc whichs school has office365 that i think does do versioning and if they use office 2013 you just save as normal and its online so no corrupted pen drives

[witch]

She seems to have saved the two reports on top of the 15 that were already there and there is no sign of anything to be recovered. Recuva only found one temp file that was corrupted, all the other things it found were unrecoverable

[witch]

She now has another problem

They write reports in excel and in the middle there is a text box with comments. The comments have disappeared!

She says she modified two and I can't see how this would affect all the others. If she had done it on the template I would expect to see the same words on all but this is not the case!

I am sure it is an excel quirk - I hate excel

[LosOjos]

I am sure it is an excel quirk - I hate excel

 

Excel is an excellent analysis tool and flat file database, but using it to write school reports? Bad idea (except in the case of it being used for data entry to be later mail merged in to something more suitable).

[sted]

for what its worth (no use presently but might stop it happening in the future). If she uses office 2013 and saves to skydrive straight from office you can using the onedrive web page go back to any (as far as i can tell most of my docs get 2-3 revisions then become legacy or copied massively edited and resaved with a new name) you litterally right click on the appropriate document and go to versions it loads it in word/excel online and shows on the left older versions. You can then preview and restore as desired older versions of said file and as said earlier onedrive is much less likely to corrupt than a pen stick and assuming you roll out or already have office 2013 on your pcs you just have to log in and you can load/save straight from onedrive as if it was a local /mapped drive

 

as to excel if you know how to use it its a very handy and powerful tool but you can also et things very wrong if you dont know what your doing and id wager most teachers have never done much with it (i managed to get some teachers to move some tables they had done in word to excel because its just better at it but it took a lot of convincing and iirc i did most of the grunt work but at least its now in a format you can easily modify year on year which with word was becoming a real chore

[witch]

I'm sure Excel is fine but not for this use. It seems to me that Excel is used as anything and everything other than what it is actually for!

We have Office 365 and are rolling out Office 2013 at Easter so I may well implement some sort of strategy re saving.

[mac_shinobi]

By shadow copy I presume that is the same as windows previous versions , well at least what windows uses to provide the previous versions feature ??

 

Also like you say because it was being done on the memory stick directly ....

Edited February 26, 2015 by mac_shinobi

[witch]

I just can't work out what on earth she actually did that wiped the content of those text boxes but didn't overwrite them with what she was typing!

[bossman]

@witch

 

I feel what she has done is overlay a blank template over the original and written her comments into 2 or 3 sections then saved it, this would have overwritten the whole Excel workbook and thus the blank comment banks.

 

Typical user error and of course there is no going back, I would advise that for future reference any staff member using a USB pendrive copy the necessary files onto their computer or laptop and work on them there and when satisfied they have everything correct copy back to the USB.

 

If they error they have a saved copy on the computer or laptop..................simple!

 

A lesson to be taken by the teachers in a 20 minute session on how to use a USB stick properly.

[witch]

@bossman

But if she did this then the new comments she wrote would surely appear on every report? But they don't!

[bossman]

@witch

 

Was the excel report exported from Sims by any chance?

[witch]

Don't think so - but I don't really know as SIMS isn't on my network