Recycle Bin on Linux

Continued from page: 2

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

TIPS Tricker

Recover mail in Outlook Express
Have you ever accidentally deleted a mail or mail folder of your e-mail client? If you’re an Outlook Express user, then you have a chance of retrieving it, if you haven’t closed Outlook Express after deleting the mail. First, determine the location of your mail folder. To do this, go to Tools>Options. Click the Maintenance tab and then the Store Folder button. Go to this location and you should still find the mail folder you deleted there. Simply copy this folder to another location and then close Outlook Express. Open Outlook Express again and this time you won’t find the folder because it’s been deleted. Now simply create a new folder by the same name as the one that was deleted. Copy a mail from another folder to it. Close Outlook Express and go to the store folder again, and copy the original “deleted” folder that you saved earlier to this place. Re-launch Outlook Express and you should be able to see the folder you had deleted with all your mail in it. 

Drupad Parsai 

System reSTORE in Win XP
Believe it or not, you can at last revert your system to an earlier point in time with a couple of clicks in Win XP. The “System Restore” application accessible from Accessories > System Tools allows you to create point-in-time snapshots, along with appropriate descriptions. The system also creates “system snapshots” whenever any programs are installed or uninstalled so that if problems creep in as a result, a single restore can at least leave your system usable. These points can be reverted to in any order and can even be undone. However,some operations like installing a service pack can invalidate previous restore/undo points.

A multi-step wizard presents you with four types of backup options: the first allows you to back up your own documents and settings, the second to back up the documents and settings of all the users on a multi-user system, a third to back up all data on the PC and the last one lets you do selective backups.

You can save the backup onto a separate medium—tape or disk, or write it onto a CD-ROM. To restore the states, either boot from the “System Restore Disk” you can create, or boot into “safe-mode with command prompt” and type in “rstrui”.
You can also invoke the same wizard and choose the “Restore my computer to an earlier point” option from the first screen.

Drupad Parsai 

Unformat your hard drive
There’s a glimmer of hope in recovering data even if you’re still running DOS on an old Pentium machine. It has an “unformat” command that can actually undo a format of your hard drive. 

This cannot however, be used when the disk has been formatted using the “/U” (don’t save unformat information) switch. The basic syntax of this command is “UNFORMAT <drive:>”. You can optionally specify the /J, /P, /L, /PARTN and /TEST switches. Issuing just the basic command will unformat the drive using the mirror-file if available, but continues just fine otherwise. 

/J checks for mirror file availability. /P sends the output to the printer and /L lists it on-screen. 

/PARTN option rebuilds the partition table, while /TEST will check if the command will succeed without actually doing anything.

Drupad Parsai 

Volume shadow copy
If you work with files that are located on shared folders on the network, configuring volume shadow copy as part of your overall disaster recovery strategy is a good option. It allows you to recover files that were accidentally deleted, recover from accidentally overwriting a file, and even compare version of files while working.

Volume shadow copy service is available with the Windows Server 2003 and is very simple to configure. This service makes scheduled snapshots or copies of the files that are located on shared resources, such as a file server. In case a file gets deleted or overwritten, you may be able to access previous versions of your files saved by the Shadow Copy service. Client software for accessing shadow copies of shared folders is also available with the server. 

The frequency of creating copies can be increased or decreased depending on the criticality of the data. For less important data, weekly copies and for crucial data, daily copies can be made. You can also make copies manually at any point of time.

Anoop Mangla

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