Unable to Recover Large Files with Recover My Files

[sfreincle]

Hi,

I inadvertantly deleted my entire Inbox and Sent Items in Outlook Express. I accomplished this by creating a new Identity and changing the Store Folder to be the same as my existing store folder. Big mistake.

Now, I'm using Recover My Files to recover these lost files. It works ok on the smaller files, but the large files are not recovered. Is there anyway to recover these large files? My Inbox is about 600 mb.

Thanks.

Best regards,

SJF...

[Thant Zin]

Hi,

I inadvertantly deleted my entire Inbox and Sent Items in Outlook Express. I accomplished this by creating a new Identity and changing the Store Folder to be the same as my existing store folder. Big mistake.

Now, I'm using Recover My Files to recover these lost files. It works ok on the smaller files, but the large files are not recovered. Is there anyway to recover these large files? My Inbox is about 120 gbys.

Thanks.

Best regards,

Thant Zin

[GDH]

You can try a "Complete File Search" for DBX files to see if you can find your deleted inbox.

However, a 600mb files is large and can be fragmented. It could have easily been overwritten with other data and destroyed.

[sfreincle]

Originally Posted by GDH

You can try a "Complete File Search" for DBX files to see if you can find your deleted inbox.

However, a 600mb files is large and can be fragmented. It could have easily been overwritten with other data and destroyed.

Thanks. I used a backup from a few days ago to restore the large files. How can I avoid having large files fragmented? The largest file recovered was 8 mb. It is necessary for me to keep files larger than this.

Best regards,

SJF...

[GDH]

Files on a PC are tracked by records in a table called the "Master File Table". Each file has an MFT record.

When a file is fragmented (pieces of the file are stored on the disk in different locations), the MFT record tracks the location of the pieces ("data runs").

When you delete a file, if a data recovery program can find the MFT record for that file then the full file can still be recovered. However, because of what you did in the renaming of your Outlook Express data store, I think you have destroyed the MFT for that file.

Fragmentation is not such a huge issue these days. It used to be bad because it would slow down your PC as the read head on your hard disk had to physically move to multiple locations on the disk to read a fragmented file. These days hard drives are so fast that it is unusual to see a reduction in speed.

To stop fragmentation you need to regularly run a disk defrag program. Windows has one built in (right click on a drive letter, select Properties, Tools).

[sfreincle]

Thank you.

Regards,

SJF