Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

spartanm73 · Joined: 25 Mar 2010 Posts: 1

Hello

The situation I am facing: A customer managed to copy the original copies of business-sensitive files to the windows CD Burning folder, at "C:\Documents and Settings\{Username}\Local Settings\Application data\Microsoft\CD Burning\", and then deleted them by clearing the files waiting to be written to CD. This is a Windows XP machine, and she attempted to use the integrated CD Burning feature to write these files to disc. She apparently cut the files from their original location and pasting them into the CD Drive folder instead of dragging them there, which actually copies a shortcut to the file instead of the file itself. These are the only copies of said files, and no current backups exist that they can be recovered from..

I have scanned the entire drive and confirmed that no other copies exist, and have attempted to find them using the following software:
-Ontrack's DataRecovery v6.1 (full version). I have run its standard recovery process as well as the deleted file process, and searched for any files of the type missing (Quickbooks company files).
-Restoration (freeware utility that searches for deleted or lost files.
-Virtuallab Recovery software (free trial)
-Stellar Phoenix (free trial)

What I need to know is whether I am unable to find references to the deleted files because the folder they were in has been overwritten since they were lost, or whether the software I have tried is just not able to perform recovery from that location... If my software cannot find these files, is there any software that will recovery from that temporary directory?

Thank you in advance for any advice you my have.