Mount, View, Explore ???

Hi, our 4 year old Dell PC is running Windows XP (SP3). Last month we bought True Image Home v11 along with an external USB drive and made our first backup. At the time I verified the backup and it said it was successful.

Yesterday, my son told me that he can't find some of his school work (on our PC) that he created about a week ago. During that time I've used CCleaner a few times, so I'm thinking that I may have inadvertently deleted his files, but I really can't be sure!

I'm hoping the missing files are on the TI backup I made a week ago and I would appreciate some guidance in determining if they are indeed there without having to restore the image ...and if they are there, would I have to restore the entire image in order to get them back?

Btw, for whatever reason I noticed my backup consists of several tib files on my USB drive which only brings about further confusion as to how I should proceed.

Any help would be most appreciated (going to work now, but I'll check back this eve)...

 

"Btw, for whatever reason I noticed my backup consists of several tib files on my USB drive which only brings about further confusion ... "

For starters, what are the size of the files and the names of a few? If they're about 4GBs in size, it's possible your USB drive is formatted FAT32 which will only allow a max file size of ~ 4GB. TI will split the backup file.
You should be able to explore the image, or you could mount it and search the assigned drive just like any drive.

 

Yes, all the tib files are just under 4GB each, so the USB drive must have come formatted FAT32.

I'm not sure I understand the difference between those two methods. Which of the two would be the best way to look for my son's files? ...and if it would be better to mount the image, can I mount it on the USB drive? Also, since TI split the image into multiple small files, do I just work with the first one?

 

Wendi -

I use an older version of TI, so I don't have explorer capability. I can explain mounting - it should be a good solution for locating your son's homework. When you mount an image file, TI assigns a drive letter to the file. For example, your system might have already assigned c (main drive), d (cd), and e (dvd). In that case, TI would assign the letter f temporarily to the image file when you mount it. If you look in "my computer" or windows explorer, you will now see drive f and you can now browse through all the directories in the image. I assume you would then look in My Documents on the mounted drive to find your son's homework files. If you find them, you can copy and paste them from the mounted drive f back to My Documents on your main drive (c)

Once you dismount the image, the f drive as I'm calling it will disappear from your system - but you would of course still have the image file for future use - to restore or to mount it again.

Hope that helps. Post again if you have any issues that I bypassed. Someone else will probably post about the explorer capability of TI 11.

BTW, I doubt that CCleaner would erase a datafile - I've never heard of that happening. When files are missing in this hosehold, I usually look at most recent file activity in the program - generally someone has accidentally stored a file in a different directory.

 

Thanks Len. I just noticed that our 60GB internal hard drive is nearly full with less than 4GB of free space! I wonder if that could have had something to do with the mystereous disappearance of those files?

In any case there doesn't appear to be sufficient room to mount the image on my internal hard drive, but I have lots of free space on my external hard drive - is that ok?

 

You should still be able to mount the drive, as it will become what is known as a virtual drive, in other words it resides in memory and not on your physical internal hard drive. Having said that, depending on exactly how much hard drive space you have left, may be a factor, but only because Windows will lay down a temporary 'housekeeping' file on your internal drive.

You won't do any damage if you try to mount your tib file and it fails.

Colin

 

Wendi -

When I started using Acronis 2 years ago, I was afraid to do anything - thinking I might damage or further damage the system. I think you're in the same place. While certain incorrect actions can have devestating results (you'll read about them on this forum all the time), mounting an image isn't one of them. So, as Bodgy said, just do it. Lack of disk space shouldn't be an issue. If the mount fails, we'll help you understand why. If it succeeds, you won't be doing any further damage with respect to lost files.

Mount it and take a look at the new drive in windows explorer - it's simple

 

Thanks guys - I'm going to try that sometime today. As TI split my image into multiple files (because of my external drive's FAT32 format), should I 'point' TI to the first file of the group?

 

You can select any file in the image group. I normally select the first split. TI knows what files go together.

 

Well I successfully mounted the image, but my son's missing files were also missing from the backup! Bummer.

Thanks anyway for all of the help.

 

Wendi,
Do not be in a hurry to give up the search. Try using several techniques.

1. Use the Windows search function.
2. Restrict the search to the specific drive letter assigned to the mounted image.
3. Search for particular file types such as *.doc *.txt, etc
4. Search within a date range. Ask to see every file name with a specific date time period such as a period when the files were known to have been edited or created.
5. My point is that the files could be elsewhere than necessary where you are looking.
6. When done with the mounted image, use the un-mount feature to remove the mounting of the image.

 

In addition to Grover's suggestion, I would open the program in which your son created the file. If it is, for example, Word or Excel, you should see recently opened files when you click on the FILE command on the menu bar. There should be a drop down window that lists the most recent files that were opened in the program. If the missing file is listed there, open it and check its properties - perhaps someone saved it accidently in an incorrect location. Or you can just use the "save as" command to resave it in a location where you want it to be.

 

Wendi,

I know there are programs you can download and use to retrieve lost files. Even if you deleted the file it is still on the hard drive until someone writes over it or you wipe the free space clean with an eraser program. Your small amount of reserve memory may have had the file overwritten already. I am not up on these programs. Maybe someone else can provide more info.


Ken

 

Thanks to all for trying to help, but I'm pretty sure the files were accidentally deleted somehow.

 

Thanks, I'll see if Google can come up with some of those!

 

This is one recovery program you might try.

http://www.recuva.com/

 

I'll give that one a go - Thanks again!

 

Here are another 2 free recovery tools you can also try:
Pc inspector
Restoration