Question : Problem: A user deleted their files from a network drive.  Backup is corrupt - how to get files back

A user thought they were deleting a few files from network drive and ntoiced many files being deleted and cancelled it before it deleted the entire folder.  I have run winundelete and the files are scattered all over the place and some of them are not readable. Does anyone know of a decent piece of software (free is good) or wiling to pay for a recovery software.  Mainly word and excell files orgnized in many folders and sub folders.  Using Windows 2003 server client windows xp professional.   My backup is very small and is not good when I try to restore it.

Answer : Problem: A user deleted their files from a network drive.  Backup is corrupt - how to get files back

BTW.  If the computer with the lost data is still running processes and/or people are writing to the partition, you should shut it down/restrict write access immediately.  Windows doesn't necessarily overwrite previously deleted sectors, but if you continue to write to the drive, it can and will overwrite deleted file data, corrupting the lost data, making recovery impossible.

You may want to review your data integrity plan due to this user mishap.  I have our system backup doing multiple backups to overcome the potential for lost data.  I have a rotation of 3 hard drive backup drives, each drive holding 1 week of data.  At the beginning of a drive's rotation, it does a full backup.  Afterwards, it does an hourly differential backup to the same drive.  The day before the next rotational full backup, I switch to the next hard drive.  This allows me to have multiple backups, the latest being an hour old, the next latest being a week old, and the last being 2 weeks old.  On top of that, we pay for online backups for the most critical data.  It's less than 20 gigs worth, but this is data that if the HDD was to get destroyed, we would need to recover no matter what.  This gets backed up over the internet to a service provider's system using their software on a daily basis and it's encrypted.  My backup also consists of a monthly archival to tape, but it's less useful for us than the real-time backups onto HDD and online.  The online backup costs us $100/year for 50 GB of data, which is very cheap (Mozy.com).