Possible to recover an overwritten file?

Solnyshko

Solnyshko

Solnyshko

Associate
Joined
11 Dec 2003
Posts
599
Location
London
My Adobe Lightroom catalog has mysteriously been replaced by a file of the same name, but at 0KB.

Previously:
Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat (2,779,624 KB)

now appears as:
Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat (0 KB)

As it's stored on an external drive I believe it became corrupted when swapping between PCs. This is a disaster as to my horror I realise I haven't back it up since April - I use it everyday for work so I have managed to lose 4-5 months of edits in one overwrite, or what I assume to be an overwrite.

My question is, can files such as Adobe's .lrcat be restored to a previous state? I have tried Window's file properties>Previous versions but there are no previous versions listed in the pop-up. I know 3rd party programs such as Piriform Recuva are useful for recovering known file types such as jpegs but for something like an program specific file type like .lrcat is there anything I can try?

Maybe a whole a drive be restored to previous state, without windows restore?

thanks in advance
 
yes, use some data recovery sofware, google for results rewiew and pick the best, format dose not matters just the file sizes
 
Right, well yes google and reviews. But beyond that, is there any way of recovery software being able to find or even see a file which has been overwritten with the same file name?

This is the real problem - I imagine it's still physically there as there's a lot of space available on the drive.
 
Last edited:
Solnyshko said:
Right, well yes google and reviews. But beyond that, is there any way of recovery software even being able to find or even see a file which has been overwritten with the same file name?

This is the real problem - I imagine it's still physically there as there's a lot of space available on the drive.
Click to expand...

Id doesn't matter whether it's the same name or not - as long as it hasn't been physically overwritten (unlikely if it's a hard drive with plenty of space) then disk recovery software will still find it and prompt you for a new name/location to save it to.
 
Armageus said:
Id doesn't matter whether it's the same name or not - as long as it hasn't been physically overwritten (unlikely if it's a hard drive with plenty of space) then disk recovery software will still find it and prompt you for a new name/location to save it to.
Click to expand...

I ran Recuva on a 10 hour scan and it is only pulling the corrupted 0KB *.lrcat

Will the pre-corrupted state be identifiable under it's name, or should I be searching for something else?

These are very long searches - I'm wondering if recuva is the best recovery tool to be using in this case.
 
Solnyshko said:
I ran Recuva on a 10 hour scan and it is only pulling the corrupted 0KB *.lrcat

Will the pre-corrupted state be identifiable under it's name, or should I be searching for something else?

These are very long searches - I'm wondering if recuva is the best recovery tool to be using in this case.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I can't recommend any particular software as haven't needed to use any - I'm sure someone else here must have some they recommend.

I wouldn't have thought you would need to search for anything - surely you just want to recover all old/deleted files?


EDIT: Have just tried Recuva - assume you have tried the "Deep Scan" and "Scan for non-deleted files (for recovery from damaged or reformatted disks)" options under the Actions tab?
 
Last edited:
Well it's just that the file is still there, but either the operating system (Win 7) or Lightroom has replaced the good file with an identically named file with a value of 0KB, and this has been the only one found by Recuva - in other words there do not appear to be any named 'hooks' to search for or that might be indexed other the new replacement, which is the dud.

Does a file which has been overwritten still exist in its previous state, and what string should be used to recover it?
 
Last edited:
Armageus said:
EDIT: Have just tried Recuva - assume you have tried the "Deep Scan" and "Scan for non-deleted files (for recovery from damaged or reformatted disks)" options under the Actions tab?
Click to expand...

After trying it on my work machine with these settings I can confirm it will recover files with the same name in the same path fine (I.e. it lists the file twice)

Need to put it into Tree view rather than list view to be useful as well
 
Armageus said:
After trying it on my work machine with these settings I can confirm it will recover files with the same name in the same path fine (I.e. it lists the file twice)

Need to put it into Tree view rather than list view to be useful as well
Click to expand...

Ah yes, sounds promising I'll give that a shot although I think I have already, just not in Tree view. Problem is every scan takes hours.

Not only not doing backups, but using an external hard drive exclusively ouch
Click to expand...

Yup embarrassingly stupid :o
 
If the file info is deleted from the file allocation table and it's sectors are overwritten you are going to have a really hard job to recover the file.

You could try FTK, but you may only be able to recover part of the file.
 
Last edited:
You're not going to get anything back using free or low cost recovery programs once vital parts of the file have been overwritten. Most programs just scan the MFT or deep scan for file headers/signatures. Parts of data from the file are still going to be there but it'll be partial and need reconstruction. You'd have to pay the high cost of having the raw data extracted and then examined by someone to try and piece it back together.
 
Think your only option will be a data recovery company but it's going to cost - depends how badly you want the data back.

I backup everything religiously, including LR. Daily backups to my server and regular offsite ones in case the worst happens. I actually get cold sweats after a shoot until I have the memory cards offloaded and in multiple locations.

At least you still have the original files - re-editing is at least possible, re-shooting usually isn't.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom