Just when I was about to shut down my computer and call it a day, my boss — let’s call him Jim — came up to me with an urgent request. You know, one of those moments you wish you packed up a few minutes earlier…
Jim had been working on a presentation for a while and when finished, he had put it on a USB stick, only to delete it minutes later mistakenly thinking he had stored it somewhere else as well. Coincidentally Jim had just told his (new) manager he would show him the presentation, and as the manager walked into Jim’s office, the panic started to set in.
I had used data recovery software before and know of quite a number of software solutions that work very well, but those require commercial licenses and thus are not readily available when you need to recover something right away.
So I did a quick search on Google PC Inspector File Recovery, a free data recovery software I had used previously to successfully recover some files from my personal computer.
Sure enough the software was able to detect the deleted PowerPoint presentation. But the condition of the file was poor, while some of the files which were deleted long before the presentation were in good or even excellent condition.
The file could be recovered, though PowerPoint would not open it, complaining the file was corrupt… To cut a long story short, we then used PPT recovery software demos trying to salvage the corrupt presentation, but only got to see previews of the recovered slides to entice us to buy the software. I wasn’t able to find any free software to recover presentations.
Jim ended up finding an older version of the presentation on his laptop and started to redo the changes he made earlier.
I’d like to know if any of you have a positive experience with a free data recovery software. Please share and save me some time next time this type of thing happens.
