welcome back to the adventure this is Adam and today we're discussing
recovering deleted files ms-dos on its own tries to protect the accidental
deletion of files by prompting for confirmation if a command would delete
all files in a directory however there are still plenty of ways to delete a
file by mistake thankfully since DOS version 5 the undelete command has been
included when a file is deleted ms-dos just marks the space used by the file as
free it doesn't actually remove the data from the disk surface that makes it
possible for the undelete command to recover a file however undelete is not a
guarantee the file can be recovered since the space on the disk is marked as
free new data may overwrite the same physical space on the disk surface where
the deleted file was also from personal experience I have found that restarting
the computer can also cause problems with undeleted successfully recovering
files ms-dos version 6 has an improved version of undelete that offers three
levels of protection we'll start with the lowest level standard with this
level of undelete dos will remove the marker on the file indicating in his
free space this should work provided another file has not been written to the
same physical space on the disk let's try it first let's take a quick look at
the contents of a file on our disk
okay now let's delete the file and for demonstration purposes we'll try to
undelete this file the slash list switch is going to show everything that can be
undeleted it does appear the file can be recovered so I'm going to try to
undelete it
now let's make sure the file is okay the contents of the file seems to be intact
now we will look at the delete tracker level of protection delete tracker uses
a hidden file called PC tracker del that holds information about files that are
deleted in the event part of the file is overwritten delete tracker attempts to
restore the remaining part of the file first we will need to enable the feature
/t is to enable the delete tracker and a is specifying the target disc now let's
try deleting a file from our disk again
now we have some detail down at the bottom that tells us what files delete
tracker found were deleted awesome okay let's try to undelete them now
that looks like it's successfully restored all of the files that we've
deleted last we have the century level of protection with Century deleted of
files are moved to a hidden directory named sentry the files will remain there
for seven days or until more room is required to store newly deleted files in
the century directory with this level of protection the physical space on the
drive is not being marked as free so the file should not be overwritten by
anything else here is a list of switches for the undelete command thanks for
stopping by see you next video