Selective data recovery (Excel)

I had a major Navy customer who just realized that he deleted several lines of cells in an excel file that were important to his work. He thinks they were deleted two weeks ago when he last wrote to the file. It contains a lot of old data, and he copied over stuff from 1995.

I sat down and told him the chance of recovery was not good, so he is bracing himself and getting ready to tell his boss the bad news. I decided to make an attempt to recover these missing cells in excel, but I'm not having any luck so far.

I tried a few different apps like EasyRecovery pro(ontrack), but weren't made for this type of recovery. He doesn't need files or folders recovered, but actual data WITHIN the file. $:\$

Anyone have a tool they could suggest? I'll have to refer him to a data recovery business as a last resort.

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Comments

RobertKaucher

KGhaleon wrote: »

I had a major Navy customer who just realized that he deleted several lines of cells in an excel file that were important to his work. He thinks they were deleted two weeks ago when he last wrote to the file. It contains a lot of old data, and he copied over stuff from 1995.

I sat down and told him the chance of recovery was not good, so he is bracing himself and getting ready to tell his boss the bad news. I decided to make an attempt to recover these missing cells in excel, but I'm not having any luck so far.

I tried a few different apps like EasyRecovery pro(ontrack), but weren't made for this type of recovery. He doesn't need files or folders recovered, but actual data WITHIN the file. $:\$

Anyone have a tool they could suggest? I'll have to refer him to a data recovery business as a last resort.

Is this a Vista computer or a file on a Server 2003 system on a shared drive? You would want to use Volume Shadow Copy to restore a previous version. Or restore it from a backup.

KGhaleon

No, it wasn't on a server and has been shifting from his desktops for the past few years. He has no other copies of the file.

tiersten

Your options are to trawl around the deleted space on his HD to try and piece together the file or to hope that Excel leaves old data in the XLS file even though it has been deleted.

The first option is going to be nearly impossible due to the vast amount of data to look through and then try to reconstruct a valid XLS file. The second option is probably not that hopeful either because you need to dig around in the file and decode the internal representation of the data if it even exists.

IMO, the data is gone.

RobertKaucher

tiersten wrote: »

Your options are to trawl around the deleted space on his HD to try and piece together the file or to hope that Excel leaves old data in the XLS file even though it has been deleted.

The first option is going to be nearly impossible due to the vast amount of data to look through and then try to reconstruct a valid XLS file. The second option is probably not that hopeful either because you need to dig around in the file and decode the internal representation of the data if it even exists.

IMO, the data is gone.

The data is gone. In a live file like that it has certainly been over written.

KGhaleon

I agree.

I tried numerous data recovery tools over the weekend, including R-Excel which I tried out this morning. No go. Sent the user the bad news and reminded him to backup to our file server from now on.