To think my IT department are fobbing me off?

[MrsWarleggan]

Posting here for traffic and hoping some IT bods might frequent here!!!

Desperately need a deleted document recovered. It was deleted early November. My IT department have told me anything deleted more than 28 days ago is a no go.

With hindsight I shouldn't have deleted it but felt there was no need for me to keep it.... Turns out now I really really need it.

Is there really nowhere for me to go? Are IT right? I've been online and it suggests there MAY be a way, but it has links/pathways I don't have the access level to go into.

In the IT department I work in nothing on desktops and laptops is backed up. Nothing at all.

If you want to make sure that a document is backed up, you have to save it to a shared drive on a server. Every person in our organisation has a personal shared drive area on on a server. The server is backed up daily and the daily backups are saved every night for 1 month. At the end of every month a single monthly backup is saved and the daily backups are deleted.

I think this is fairly standard practice & would never assume that a document saved to a local drive is backed up.

It is possible that it could be retrieved using powershell or CMD providing the parts of the drive it was stored on have not been overwritten and it is quite simple if you have admin priveledges.

Call your IT dept rather than email and beg. I know if I get emails regarding things I don't have to fix but know how to fix my reply is always "Sorry, but no". If I get a phonecall about something I don't have to fix but know how to fix I will normally help.

If it has been over written it will require special forensic software and a lot of expertise so I doubt your IT dept will do much more than search your hardrive using tools already in Windows. Fingers crossed it has not been overwritten yet.

I'd like to offer a different perspective as everyone is going complex. Is the file still in your recycle bin (Windows)/trash (Mac) on your laptop/work computer? Usually these just sit accumulating deleted files until you empty them, although you can set them to empty regularly. It's only when you empty the trash/recycle bin that the file is actually classed as "deleted" and if you open the trash/recycle bin, you will have the option to restore anything in there.
You may have to search on your computer to find either the recycle bin in Windows or the trash folder in Mac as, depending on your settings, they're not always easy to find.
Secondly, if you ever sent it in an email, most email providers keep a copy of attachments in your sent folder.

Please don’t download any programs to recover anything without your IT dept confirming its ok to do so! Its a big nono in my gov dept.

Our IT would also not be recovering this. We save all docs on Sharepoint if they are needed for business, where the recycle bin is 90 days i think.

Speaking to OH who is an IT manager, he say’s it isn’t part of best practice to delete back ups after 28 days. But, as it was on your desktop it won’t be backed up. As @Kleptronic says, it may be recoverable if you can use the right type of software, but only if none of the bits have been overwritten.

I think YABU. It’s not that easy to recover files and don’t think it’s fair to ask them to dedicate hours to finding something that you actively deleted.

If it were on a back up kept by IT, it would be part of their job to recover it if requested. Most of what they do is fixing user errors anyway, this is no different. Sure they wouldn’t like it but everyone has parts of their job they hate.

Have you checked your downloaded file?

@MrsWarleggan

Thing that is royally pissing me off is that I've got documents from YEARS ago sitting in my recycle bin.... But not this one!!!

The recycle bin is a compromise for deletion. Instead of deleting a file your computers operating system just marks the file as moved to a different folder called ‘recycle bin’, and only deletes when you empty the bin. On deletion the file still exists and it’s part of the drive is marked as available. It could be overwritten shortly after or remain and be available for a recovery/undelete.

On a network it is less common to be able to have a recycle bin, but there are time limited ones on some systems.
The main route would be to a backup, and as IT have told you that there is a 28 day limit then that is probably the retention time policy for their backups

Thankyou for all so very much for your help and advice. Do worry that it is actually got to be a no then. Bugger. But thankyou ❤️

Hi op, I’m in local government too in IT and unfortunately we wouldn’t be able to restore this. Part of our policy is to only restore up to 28 days - past that would be breaking that policy even if it is physically possible. Not sure if the policy is dictated from on high or just our branch level but we would have to say no to restoring this because of it.

I'm sure we've found versions of documents (so not necessarily the last saved version, but at least something) in temp files before: Quick google brings this up:

Method 2. How to find deleted Word documents in Temp files
All deleted Word files are stored in a special folder for some time; if you know where they are, you can easily restore them.

Usually, temporary files are here:

C:\UserName\administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

In this last folder, you need to look for the deleted file. Then right-click on it and select Restore. Thus, you will recover a deleted Word document.

Not sure if this would work for other applications, but worth a try if they too have a temp file folder.

Do you have a shadow directory on your computer OP? I have found deleted docs there before. You should be able to "search" your whole computer by typing in all or part of the title.

Right click on any folder and see if restore previous versions is there. This will let you know how far back your company backs up