Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Computer Question

[doogalman]

Can anyone give an answer to this:-

I have overwritten something and yes I've overwritten the wrong thing!!! and No the back-up on the flash drive was not right upto date so I couldn't just overwrite again with the old details. So the question is can you turn back time on the computer's system to the day before the original overwrite??? Or am I completely stuffed???? Yes I have learnt the hard way!!

[david.hicks]

You need a 'temporal time-shift' PCMCIA card - should be able to get one from PC World. I think HGWells Computers and DeLorean both make them (I think DeLorean's is called the "Back to the Future" card) - careful how you use it though as you could find yourself back in time before the invention of the motorcycle!

Seriously though mate - you are b*ggered. One slim hope is that the when you overwrote the file the data was actually saved to a different physical place on the hard disk and the original file (or some of it) is still there. In that could maybe use a low-level utility by Norton or similar to access the disk-drive directly. Not sure what Norton is calling this utility at the moment - they seem to change the names of their programmes every year or so. Last time I lookedit was called Norton Disk Doctor I think. Best of luck!

[doogalman]

Thanks for coming back so quickly. I just had that feeling I was seriously b**gerd!! If only DeLorian could have saved my bacon!! Oh well, I'll just have to restore from the flash drive that last saved time and re-do whats needed. Thanks again.
PS: This stupid mess up was not doogalman - it's me, doogalman's missuz (yes a senior or blond moment was had).

[Nigel C]

are you running XP? and if it is turned on you can use a system restore point

[doogalman]

Tried the system restore on a differant pc to see if it would work. to no avail.

[Paul James]

Was going to suggest system restore as you are supposed to be able to go back to a "snapshot" of the PC at the time you took the data collection.

[antonye]

Depending on how long ago it is / if you've rebooted / etc, you may be able to just to CTRL+Z (undo) as this will also undo any file changes you made, like deleting, overwriting, etc.

[Iconic944ss]

Hi, from memory there is a basic app called 'recover my files' that lets you recover a few files for 'free' in a demo mode.

Try a search for that term - or if needed I have a few other utils laying around

Frank

[t5mission]

System restore only does system files not your work files.

[JPM]

Originally posted by t5mission
System restore only does system files not your work files.

Absolutely... it only takes a snapshot of the registry and system files, not user data.

Youy might be lucky (very) and it's created a temporary file while you were updating... check your temp folder(s) and maybe do a search for *.tmp and ~*.*