PowerCadd deleted file recovery

[Damon]

Hello All,

I am looking for advice on recovering deleted PCadd files.

The trail of blunder, in brief, is that I created a folder of project files on my iMac to move to my iBook to take with me when I went on holiday. The files were 'copied' to new 'away' folder on my iMac desktop. This folder was copied to a flash drive and then to my iBook, and off I went.

Upon my return, as I had made no changes to any of the files, I deleted the 'away' folder and files from my iBook, the flash drive and my iMac desktop. Several days later I realized that I had in fact moved, rather than copied the drawing files to the 'away' folder. Hence I deleted all three sets of file copies, including the original files. Clearly I missed the option key when I dragged the files.

So, I took my iBook to a mac store to have them do a recovery, and I bought an external drive and Data Rescue 3 and did a file recovery of my iMac and the flash drive.

Summary: Data Rescue does not seem to find PCadd files; it will find indesign, Vectorworks, Photoshop, Autocadd and a host of other file types.

I even tried the IQ feature that apparently allows Data Rescue to learn new file types. No luck, or even any apparent change in the recovered files.

Because the iBook was hardly used after I deleted the drawing files, I am surprised that nothing was found. In fact none of the recovery methods found any powercadd files, on either computer or the flash drive.

Plenty of old and long ago deleted files, in pdf or Vectorworks or auto cadd formats were found, but not a single powercadd file. That mystery just adds to the annoyance of it all.

Any thoughts at all? My evenings are looking very dismal for this week as I reconstruct drawings from partial dxf's sent to others.

Grazie amici,

[Rob C]

Wow, what a drag. I'm surprised it matters what application created a file for a utility to find it. You're in uncharted territory as far as my experience goes, but you might try asking Engineered Software themselves first thing Monday morning. If anyone has a clue, they might.

[How Goes It]

Tough situation. Wish I could offer some advice.

But for anyone else --- I like the idea of critical file back-ups to CD-R's ---- something that can't be erased.

Even if it's a file that you may not have need of latter down the road, but is important at the time, where you wouldn't want it erased accidentally, I like incremental CD-R's back-ups. Latter on, you could use a shredder that is designed for shredding CD's --- that is, if you needed to clean out old files or make more room in your CD storage area or holder.

And of course, if you don't label those CD-R's well, you could accidentally shred a CD-R that shouldn't have been destroyed.

[Damon]

Thanks, guys.

I usually do a triple copy DVD archive of projects. I intended to to an in-progress back up before I went away, but no such follow through on the good intentions.

However, I have sent some powercadd files to the Data Rescue tech people. They said that they will try to delete and recover the PCadd files. Perhaps there will be some file type or creator code that they can help establish.

I'll update when I know more.

[Peter Severin Carlsen]

I lost 800 pictures from a trip to Oxford not realizing that when I tried to make a CD of the files I was actually moving the files instead of just a link to the originals. I thought it was a very clever trick of OS10. Surprise. I also took my machine to see I could recover any of the folders and was told they could find nothing.

It's not a lot of fun loosing work that way. On the other hand I'm not terrific about making backups.

Peter

[Damon]

Update on the file recovery efforts:

Some success in general, but disappointment in specifics.

Using the IQ feature in Data Rescue 3 I've managed to make DR learn PCadd file types, and it has found PCadd files and recovered them. It has not, however, found files for the two projects I most recently deleted. Naturally these are the files that I need most. That is the luck of the computer overwrite lottery I suppose.

For others, I suggest taking a usb flash drive, re-formatting it to remove all data, and then copying a few PCadd files to it. Drag the files to the trash and empty it, and then try your data recovery software or methods to see if, in fact, the files are recovered from the usb stick. May as well test for failure before the actual crisis.


Thanks all,