Thanks for your responses, guys. On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Twayne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Do NOT use that drive if you can help it. Don't even use the computer > if it's stored on the boot drive. That minimizes the chances of > overwriting the deleted file, which does still exist; it's just not > mapped to. The more you use the computer the more chance the file will > be overwritten.
Well, sadly, at least on client machines with sensitive data, I have a bad habit of using Eraser to do 26 passes of random data over deleted files when I empty the recycle bin, which just about kills that option, I think. Unfortunately, all hope is lost for that file. I checked the temporary files on the backup drive, none of them were that document. I emptied the files in the recycle bin before backing up, nothing is there either. On the bright side, turns out things go much faster the second time around, and it gives me a chance to rethink and reorganize some ofa the original document a little. Brian gets to hear this story twice, but as a word of caution to the rest of you (and maybe a little laugh), here is how not to save your files: What had originally happened is I had saved the document as HTML about 2 days ago just to see what the HTML version would look like. It didn't click with me that I was continuing to work with the HTML file, rather than the original ODT file, and I never closed OpenOffice for those 2 days so I continued saving progress to the HTML file. I had also created a number of other temporary HTML documents in the same location and after finally finishing the document and closing OpenOffice, just before backing up the drive, I deleted (and "shredded") all the temporary HTML files -- and of course one of those "temporary" files was my working document. Oops! (And no, the web browser doesn't cache local files, sadly!). Guy Voets wrote: > Yes, that's what they call bad luck... As you can see, it's a bit more than just bad luck! :-) Suffice it to say that I turned on automatic backups, and will also be much more careful in the future. Learned it the hard way this time! Thanks again, Jason --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
