How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot-A Happy Ending

vitalforce wrote on 2/20/2005, 9:43 PM
I posted last week in a mild panic over losing the .veg file links to numerous files in a DV feature project, when I selected "Copy and Trim Media with Project," not understanding that Vegas doesn't copy the media per se, it renames the video file referenced to each timeline event and breaks it up while copying to new files.

In the meantime due to this misunderstanding, about 25% of my newly created files (the "Copy andTrimmed" ones) were deleted after glitches appeared in the copy process, but I couldn't reference the .veg file back to the original media. I thought I was doomed to repeat about 40-50 hours of re-editing.

This is not a commercial but a hint offered to fellow users: I found a program called "Active@ UNDELETE" which is $39 and worth ten times that price. In about six hours, the program retrieved 32 GB of video, audio and data files from a firewire disc, which I had given up on as deleted, without missing a byte. I sent in my kudos to the Active company, and strongly suggest that those interested put this valuable tool in their kit. Tonight I'm back in business and getting ready to meet some festival deadlines.
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Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 2/20/2005, 9:47 PM
Hey! Happy endings DO sometimes happy outside the movies! Glad to hear it all worked out. I've never seen that particular software, I've used OnTrack (recommended by someone here, I've forgotten who) but it saved my butt on more than one occasion.
Good luck meeting the deadlines, and good luck at the festival!
vitalforces wrote on 2/21/2005, 9:27 AM
Thanx DSE. From your mouth to the ears of whatever super-natural entity gives life meaning.
BillyBoy wrote on 2/21/2005, 10:25 AM
The term "delete" has odd meanings in the computer world since nothing is ever deleted. Once a file is written to a hard drive it remains there unless and until something else overwrites the space it occupies.

That's why "undeleting" works. All that's really happening is depending on the file system used either the FAT (file allocation table in FAT 32) or the index in NTFS (new type file system) instead of pointing to the sectors used to write the file on the hard drive get marked as deleted which means Windows is then free to reuse those sectors again.

So if you ever have a problem and by mistake "delete" something IMMEDIATELY stop using the PC so the space that got marked as free again isn't reused. Then use your favorite recovery tool which basically does nothing more than remove the delete status from files so marked. Successful recovery depends on if or not some of the sectors were already reused and written with something else. So avoid any attempt at defragging, or even saving or moving any file until you make the recovery.

When a disk drive goes "bad" again, assuming it still can spin and there is nothing mechanically wrong with it frequently only the FAT or index is corrupted so Windows can't find some or all of the parts of some files. In this kind of failure the recovery utility reads all the sectors one after the other (without using the operating system) and in doing so once finished is able to rebult the FAT or index.

Remember.... the only way to physically remove any file or fraction there of once its written to a hard drive is to overwrite it with something else. This process is called "wiping" and typically involves writing a pattern of zeros and ones, frequently in several different passes making it impossible to read what was once on the disk.

Also if you use your computer to store things you wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands like if you were a spy, or you have a recipe for BBQ sauce you don't want anybody to swipe then be aware the way Windows works is it uses fragements of files (either those marked deleted or those recently accessed) which could be anything already written to your hard drive or accessed in your swap file or swapped out to a memory page to fill "slack" space which is the difference between the size of all sectors used to hold the file and the actual physical size of the file. You can see this by going to Windows Explorer, right clicking on any file and seeing the difference between size and size on disk. Forensic software, like recovery software reads hard drives sector by sector so even if files are deleted, reformated even the chances big chunks of what was once files is still there and fairly easy to recover which I'm assuming the various government agencies do when they capture computers from the terrorists, etc..