Today, I went ahead and installed Vista RC2 on my main desktop machine at home. I installed it via a clean install so I had to go through the exercise of backing up the data I wanted to keep on to another partition, installing Vista, and then moving the data back to where it should be post-install. During the last step of the process, I ended up deleting a bunch of the files by mistake and even emptied my recycle bin immediately after doing so. It’s a habit of mine to do the two together except that this time I had deleted more files than I had intended and hadn’t noticed.

This reminded me of many years ago being in a similar situation (it really has been over 15 years probably since this kind of thing last happened to me) and how I had used a variety of undelete tools. Those were the days of DOS and FAT but I figured they’d still be around nowadays in some form. I was right about them being around but it took me a couple of trial downloads to get to the point where I found one that I was confident would work on Vista. Most of them seemed to be a few years old and I wasn’t feeling all that confident at this point.

While searching I also found that Vista has a great new feature that would probably help me out. It’s called Previous Versions and you can get to it by selecting it from the context menu of a folder (or file I think). Unfortunately, I had just installed Vista and I think it hadn’t had time yet to go through and archive past versions of the files I was looking to restore.

In the end though, the one that I found (and ended up purchasing) was Active Undelete. It worked for me and I figured I’d post about it in case someone else ends up in this scenario and comes across this through a desperate search.