[Fahrenheit]

Is there a way to recover the data from MS Excel. The data has been deleted, but not the file itself. I thought of autosave, but I dont think that is going to work in this case. Is the data stored in a location, in the same way as recycle bin, or in any form, after deletion. Its quite important we get this data back.

(By the way, I didnt do it, it was a friend!)

[Banana]

At that point, do not save or write anything on the hard drive.

When you delete a file, only the pointer(header? address? what is the correct term?) containing the physical location is deleted. So it's somewhere on the hard drive, just not accessible.

You'd need a software that does "Un-Delete" to do that. I don't know if there's any free software or if they're worth it, though.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Banana When you delete a file, only the pointer(header? address? what is the correct term?)

It depends on the file system, actually. They use different terms at times. One common one on Unix-esque systems is "inode", for "indexed node". Another is just "directory entry".

HFS+ calls it a "catalog node ID", ("CNID"), or specifically just a "file ID" or "folder ID".

[Brad]

Originally Posted by Banana When you delete a file, only the pointer(header? address? what is the correct term?) containing the physical location is deleted. So it's somewhere on the hard drive, just not accessible.

*ahem*

Originally Posted by Farenheit Is there a way to recover the data from MS Excel. The data has been deleted, but not the file itself.

For what it's worth, Microsoft Word saves files with lots of redundancy in them and .doc files often do contain old data that you thought you deleted. You can retrieve some old data by pulling strings from the file. I don't believe Excel, on the other hand, keeps around old data the same way. In some brief testing, I was unable to retrieve strings from an .xls file after I saved, deleted some content, and saved over it again.

So, you (or your friend) may just be SOL.

[Banana]

*shrinking in a corner*

[Fahrenheit]

Its Ok, it wasnt a huge amount, just about 110 rows, which we have managed to rewrite out. So no biggie, just a bit of a dopey friend!

Cheers.