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circledock DELETED ALL MY FILES! help!

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mouser:
thegipper,

as someone who has suffered from data loss in the past, i know that no amount of saying sorry or sympathy is going to do much to ease your pain.

this shouldn't have happened to you.  you have every right to be angry and upset.  and i want to thank you for being so understanding and not becoming uncontrollably enraged at the programmers, as i fear i might have become.

the only thing i can say is that the people who work on circle dock feel truly sick about this, and have worked hard to get out a fix and make sure this kind of thing never happens again.  if it's any consolation at all, it's that your loss, and your taking the time to come here and tell us about it, has no doubt saved others from suffering the same fate.  so for that we thank you.


for the programmers out there, as has been pointed out by others in this thread, if you get the brilliant idea of adding a function to your program that involves deleting the contents of a folder, you should stop what you are doing, take a break from the computer, and jump into an ice cold shower.  it's just a recipe for disaster, and no matter how clever you try to be, the chances of something going wrong are just way to high to offset any convenience that might be gained.  the solution, if you need the directory emptied, is as veign suggests, and as i understand circledock does now, is simply to tell the user to go empty the directory on their own.

wraith808:
Another suggestion for this kind of situation in general would be restoring a system snapshot - even Windows restore point could/would have rectified this "disaster", not to mention the many better applications to create snapshots.
-joiwind (February 04, 2010, 11:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

A windows restore point will not restore lost non-system files, so it wouldn't have rectified the problem- in fact, it would have made it more difficult to retrieve the data.

Dormouse:
One of the things I never quite understood was the need for a 'Make Portable' function.
A lot of apps have Install and Portable options available.
I have some apps with the 'Make Portable' option, but they are all shareware and I always assumed that this was a way of having portable functionality with a lower risk of having their app ripped off. But since CircleDock is free and Open Source, that can't apply here.
I just continued  to use Eric's version for portable needs so I never spent time trying to work out the answer or ask the question here, but it still intrigues me.

joiwind:
Another suggestion for this kind of situation in general would be restoring a system snapshot - even Windows restore point could/would have rectified this "disaster", not to mention the many better applications to create snapshots.
-joiwind (February 04, 2010, 11:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

A windows restore point will not restore lost non-system files, so it wouldn't have rectified the problem- in fact, it would have made it more difficult to retrieve the data.
-wraith808 (February 04, 2010, 11:51 AM)
--- End quote ---

I don't agree. I have often restored a snapshot after mistakes etc and I have always been able to completely recuperate everything.
Are we talking about the same thing ? I use Farstone Driveclone Pro and automatically make a snapshot once every 24 hours plus a snapshot when I am about to install something that could make important changes and this has often got me out of serious trouble.

Any other opinions on this ?

Kamel:
I'm sorry to hear about your loss. It is, in the least, a very good thing that you discovered it and others will not make the same mistake due to the software being fixed.

Legally, they could have ignored you and not cared, but I think it does show their true heart that they did respond as promptly and diligently as they did. I've actually had paid for software wipe out entire windows installs before, adobe premiere being one of them. Nothing I could do, sue them perhaps? Not that I had any shred of proof that their software had actually caused my program files folder to be wiped (and essentially had to reinstall windows).

In the end, I think the operative lessons learned here are A) The programmers do actually care about the people who are using their software B) It is, indeed, a very good idea to keep good backups for many reasons (Hardware failure does happen) C) When something like this happens, as soon as you notice, do not allow ANY file operations to happen, as it makes recovery more difficult/impossible. (It's a good idea to turn off the computer and remove the drive entirely until you have done enough research on how best to approach the recovery of the software)

This isn't to say that you did anything wrong at all. Data loss is a part of life unfortunately. I store my important data in an encrypted DVD library, but even then a single fire and I would be 'toast'. In highschool, I was taught by my physics teacher that there are no constants in the physical universe, and that's an unfortunate truth of life.

I feel sorry for you losing your data, if I or anyone else here could do anything to help, please let us know. I believe we have shown our willingness, as a community, to assist you with this of course, but please do not hesitate to ask for any additional assistance. Quite a few brilliant minds are here, who have had to do extensive data recovery, so we may be able to assist you.

PS. I'll never forget the night my friend and I spent all night long reading a data recovery forensics book, trying to write a program to recover the files that were lost from my hard drive. Once finished with the program, it did its job well, as good as any enterprise solution could (seeing how the data is either there or not), only about 5% of my data was recovered properly in the end. Several years later, my friend came to me and told me he had found a bug in the program which caused it to improperly recover files that had to be segmented on the disk. My data was never recovered, but the resulting program still works extremely well. I could ask him to allow you to use it, if you are still interested in trying (assuming you haven't ran any write operations on that disk). It works extremely well, it just may take more space to the files than the size of the disk itself. The reason for this is the fact that it ignores all "sanity checks", so if there are 2 references to 1 file, it will still restore it and the resulting file will have a good version and a corrupt version. It's the most thorough form of data recovery you can do though, and has the highest chance of recovery.

Anyway, I'll stop blabbing. Sorry to hear about this, but at the same time it is encouraging to see that the community took such great efforts to help.

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