i was working on my book when the prgram froze. when i restarted my
computer i was unable to retrieve it. well i had to go through some
ascII filter then the text document. all 36 pages of it were dislayed as
###########3 signs. it is very important to me to recover my book. it is
5 months of work. please help me or refer me to someone who can.
sincerely, conrad smith i ahve attatched my work.
Conrad,
I've been in your situation many times, and I've seen many others in it,
and I've very sorry for you.
There's no useful data within your ODT file, so don't waste any further
energy trying to "restore" anything from that file. As Paul has said,
you should first check for backups within your PC. Have you any
printouts? Did you email copies to anyone?
If you have been updating the report frequently over the recent months,
and the file is on a personal PC (rather than a central server
somewhere), then it's possible/likely that there are many old copies
scattered all over the hard disk, but not directly "retrievable". You'll
need to use some special recovery tools that will scan through the
currently unused/free portions/sectors/clusters of the disk, looking for
files that look like your document (they're ZIP files containing
XML/ASCII structures) convert these to ordinary files, and see if you
got lucky.
However, this could be very time-consuming, and is technically a bit tricky.
Also, the probability of success depends on what OS and filing system is
used (eg, Windows, Linux, FAT32, NTFS, etc), and how much the PC/server
has been used since the damage occurred - as the PC is used normally,
all that free-space gets used sooner-or-later, and, eventually, all old
copies of your report will be overwritten with other files, and
restoration won't be possible. So, if you're going to check out the
above option, do not use the PC further; maybe even take out the HDD and
put it into another PC as a "secondary/slave" drive, to maximise your
chances of success. Even installing recovery programs on the same HDD
will, obviously, overwrite some of the free-space, and should be avoided.
- Mike
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