An unofficial blog that watches Google's attempts to move your operating system online since 2005. Not affiliated with Google.

Send your tips to gostips@gmail.com.

March 15, 2006

Google Desktop As Data Recovery Software

Google Desktop doesn't delete from its index the files you have deleted or moved. Of course you can remove files one by one from the index, but that's not something you would do for every deleted file.

While some people (including me) may say that Google Desktop is not very clever and it should detect non-existent files in its index and remove them, you should also see the bright side. Google Desktop caches files, so if you delete an important Office document, you will have the HTML version in Google Desktop cache. Of course, it doesn't have images, charts or fancy tables, but it does have the text and that's the most important.

So if you don't have a data recovery software, you can use Google Desktop as a partial replacement. A data recovery software recovers complete files (not just the text as Google Desktop does), but it's also expensive.

Google Desktop stores in its cache different versions of a file, so you could use it to track differences between the original document and its later edits.

Related:
Recover lost partitions
System Rescue Live CD

4 comments:

  1. I've read that already countles times. I would appriciate though, if someone could explain to me "HOW" to recover the data. There is no such an option when you search your files. Thank you anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, easy. Just click on the "cache" link next to the search result. You'll find one or more versions of the file you've just deleted.

    This works only for text files or documents (doc, xls, pdf etc.), but keep in mind that Google saves in the cache only the HTML version of the document. Despite that, the feature is really useful.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Top 10 data recovery software http://snap-server-recovery.blogspot.com/2009/03/snap-raid-server-recovery.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dear all you can try Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery Software to recover your Data.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.