marcella

I went into some older folders on my HD's today and discovered that hundreds of Office documents are properly named and located but all 0 byte. The same is true on my backups and even image files stored on external HD's. Every such file is dated 7/22/98 5:30 PM. The files were never erased by me, and the partition has not been reformatted since I built my system in 2003.

Not all such files are gone. More recent Office files are intact, as are all graphic files. I'm stunned.

Whatever happened must have done so, unnoticed, before I created the backups. SpinRite 6 has not recovered anything. Are all my data gone for good? Any thoughts on what did this?

MicroBell

marcella,

Have you done a virus scan? Sometime last month a virus was released that wipes out DOC files along with Zips, RAR's and bunch others. See what the scanners turn up. Also run "DiskCheck" to make sure the harddrive itself doesn't have a problem with corrupt sectors.

marcella

This truncation of selected files took place well over a year ago. I dug an old IDE drive out of the closet parts bin that was replaced by the SATA drives in the system I built in 2003 and use now - the same old files are zero byte on it too. I intercept all email through a proxy that removes about 98% of all spam before it comes into my email client, where it is again scanned by Trend Micro before it gets to my inbox. Once Each day, I also run CounterSpy and Ewido as standalones. I'm clean. My wireless network is WPA secured behind both a wired and wireless router each of which uses MAC filtering to allow only my devices.

Don't know what else I can do. In any case these are files I have not had to look at in a long time, so I've been backing up and imaging them across three other hard drives without realizing the probelm.

Currently I'm running a data recovery program in trial demo mode to see if there is anything lying around that I can recover. It's a 5 hour scan so will know later.

Thanks for responding.

MicroBell

Ouch....

If your older HD had the Zero data before you moved to the SATA you'll need to run this data recovery program on the ORGINAL drive that stored the data since each image you made was already zero bytes...it can't recover what wasn't there. :O(

Have a peek in DOS mode and see if it displays the same filesizes.

marcella

I realized that and put the old drive in. I ran four different trial data recovery programs (they won't recover but do find any recoverable data). They found thousands of lost or deleted files, but those that I wanted were still 0 byte files. So, they're gone.

Lesson learned? Do a search on 0 byte files occasionally, especially before doing backups or images. You might be surprised what you find but at least you will know it before you overwrite a better backup set.

Thanks anyway.