At one of my previous jobs, one in which my IT career was just getting started, an employee was let go because of a dispute with the organization. The employee had developed some code which the organization relied on heavily (part of their trade secret) and was arguing that the code was his property vs. the organization’s. So before leaving the premises the employee decided to highlight the C: drive on his windows computer and hit the Delete Key.
For those of you who know a bit about Microsoft Windows knows that today, this probably wouldn’t do much because Microsoft has put safeguards in place, but this was the early days of windows. Basically most of the files on the computer were deleted except a few which were in use.
So, being the newbie computer geek and excited about proving myself to myself I took on the challenge, to get back the code that the employee intended to wipe out for good.
After a bit of research I found an undelete program, booted the computer from a floppy disk with this program on it (which shows you how long ago this was) and was successful in recovering the code.
Every time I come across a new undelete or file recovery program I think about my first real business challenge in the IT field. This time I found Recuva, a free to use file recovery tool. Although there are others out there, including Linux distributions built specifically for this, finding new tools is still exciting.