Re: Can it be recovered???

[Ludwik Kowalski <KowalskiL@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU>]

Thanks again to all who tried to help. I did leave the
computer at home idle and came to school. This and
earlier messages (except the first SOS) were sent
from school.

I just saw two of our local experts. Both know Norton
Utility and have extensive troubleshooting experience.
They say Norton, or any other software, would work
to recover a file which was deleted (putting into the
trash and emptying the trash). But it would not work
for a file which was overwritten. The part which is
sitting somewhere on the disk has no information
about what it was.

So it looks like I should start working to recreate what
was lost as soon as possible. I still remember what it
was, more or less. Learn from my mistake, protect
your intellectual investment.
Ludwik Kowalski

John Denker wrote:

> To prevent (or at least alleviate) such problems in the future, you should
> get into the habit of checkpointing your files.  That is, take the file
> foo.doc and copy it to foo-1.doc.  A little later, copy the current version
> (always foo.doc) and copy it to foo-2.doc.  Then foo-3.doc.  (The first
> thought that comes into many people's mind is to use the highest-numbered
> checkpoint as the current version, but don't do it.  You want the current
> version to have an unchanging unnumbered name.)
>
> Disks are about $10.00 per gigabyte these days, so there's not much sense
> in economizing on disk space.  Only if/when the disk fills up should you
> bother to rampage around and delete some of the ancient checkpoints.
>
> Oh, and you should back up the whole disk to tape (or some other offline
> storage) every so often.