Success Stories

We are very pleased with Undelete 2009. We have "saved" many users who inadvertently deleted a file or directory on our file servers (no recycle bin) or who needed a previous version of a document that was overwritten. This is much faster and more convenient than having to restore a file from a previous backup using our existing backup solution.

Ken Quick , Information Systems Security Officer
National Research Council of Canada
June 2009

I have been an Undelete customer for over 7 years (at this firm and my previous employer) and have too many stories to tell on how it prevented data loss. We use this tool routinely to recover the accidental “Save As”, or over write. Our CAD staff loves the fact we can even go back to previous versions of files from that day, which can get them back to the correct version easily.

I will share my favorite of all time: About 3 years ago we had an incident where an engineer spent 2 days in the field taking photographs of a building that had a particular failure, (I believe it was the roof) and it was “a moment in time” event that could never be reproduced. They came back to the office, uploaded the photos to the project folder on the server and then allowed someone else to borrow the camera for another project. They then erroneously told someone else it was OK to delete the “temp” folder that he had just placed his new photos. Of course they had only been on the server for a few minutes, so a nightly backup process would not have caught them.

Of course panic ensued. However, the Branch Manager recalled an announcement to the company that the IS Department had installed the Undelete Server recovery tool and thought we may be able to recover them. They called the IS Help Desk and we restored hundreds of photos without a problem in a minute or so.

The amount of time we save getting a file back quickly to staff, compared to tape backup, pays for itself almost immediately and I strongly recommend this product to other IS Managers that have a need to protect their data and recover it in a timely fashion.

Information Systems Manager
Illinois Law Firm
February 2009

Undelete allows us to quickly recover lost data without the need to have to go to either of our disk or tape backups. I would have to say that we can recover roughly 85 to 90 percent of the files using Undelete that we get requests to recover. This does save us from having to go into our backup archives and find the most recent version of the file, then load the correct tape, wait while the loader (if the file isn't on disk) loads and indexes the tape and then wait some more for the restore job to complete.

We don't have any wonderful "save the day" stories. We do our best to avoid "save the day" moments as much as humanly possible. However, we rely heavily on technologies that assist us with that goal in mind and Undelete is one of those.

Eric Pitts, Technology Services Manager
Kern County Treasurer and Tax Collector
January 2009

Shortly after installing Undelete (1 week actually), I switched locations for my users offline/secondary Outlook mailboxes to reside in individual personal folders created on my primary storage server. This way when each new user is added to the network for the first time a dedicated user folder is created and any secondary offline mailboxes are also placed in them as well.

My CEO accidentally deleted his Outlook .PST file with years of important emails and I of course was the hero, being able to recover the file and reinstall in his Outlook in no time flat.

I have had other small "Oh my gosh, can you please help me?" emergencies, usually for spreadsheets and Word docs that people are working on & then delete the wrong version but nothing has been as satisfying as saving the boss' hide with as little effort as a few mouse clicks.

TT, Marketing Manager
Simi Valley, CA
January 2009

There is not a day that goes by that the entire staff finds the usefulness of Undelete. We have many a client that for one reason or another, needs a file restored that they were just working on or that was late before the weekend. Without having to pull old backup tapes for the weekend restores, or for the person that was just working on a document, we go to Undelete and restore the much-needed document. It has been a great investment for the company to continue to use. Undelete has saved so many last minute documents and the time it takes to find and try to restore.

Undelete is the greatest and I would recommend it to any IT administrator. We still back up the server, so with Undelete added to the full backup routine, it is almost bullet proof. I am working to virtualize the servers so that I truly will have a disaster plan.

Gary K. McDonald ISA III
San Joaquin County Public Health Dept
December 2008

I use Undelete for recovery of deleted items and to see if the items were deleted or just moved.

We use shadowcopies, undelete, replication to disk in other cities, and backup to tape. Undelete is used to see who deleted the file, when it was deleted, keeps history of deleted files. We are able to control how long files are kept as well as how much data is changed within our bin window. Shadowcopies are offloaded to a separate volume and are used for point in time restores where undelete is when deleted restores. Replication is disaster recovery and backups are for historical restores that reach beyond any of the other types.

The cost of the system is not really expensive compared to the amount of time it saves the user community from having to recreate the work lost. Undelete is also very fast and easy to manage saving time on the IT side for user support.

David Chadwick
Network Admin
SHW Group Inc
Dallas, TX
December 2008

Undelete is a must have for any OS that doesn’t have Volume Shadow. Being able to go back in time and pick any version of the file is a wonderful thing, and being able to exclude certain directories/files ensures that the repository doesn’t get bloated with unnecessary files.

Edmund J. Centella
Network Operations Manager
Claims Processing Facility, Inc.
Naperville, IL
December 2008

I'm very satisfied with the product. I purchased it because I accidently deleted more than 100 gigas, about 18'000 images. It took me almost two days to get them back, but I had no backups for at least half of those pictures. However, after I purchased Undelete I was able to retrieve the images where there was no backup easily and very very quickly. So your software has already paid for it self.

M.S.
May 2006

It saved me about 3 weeks work as I deleted a complete directory... the wrong one. So worth every penny and it's a real lifesaver at 03:00 !! You get a very nasty sinking feeling when you realize what you've done:) I've only needed undelete once in 18 years and it worked. Worth every penny. Many thanks.

Tony Knight
United Kingdom

"We were very happy to be able to recover files that were deleted as a result of a hacker's attack of our web site. The system worked with only one problem. The Undelete product saved our skin. We thought the Systems Branch was backing up our files, but they weren't. One can never assume anything. We have since purchased our own backup software and are backing up to a hard disc that is dismounted after use.

We had a number of applications on the server that were hit by a malicious hacker. We had a Web Board forum for persons interested in the satellite frequency registration and notification process with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). We also had contributions from many countries as input to the process of developing new resolutions for the ITU.

The server was attacked through a hole left by the MSDE product that was automatically loaded when we loaded the Web Board product. If we had been warned about the hole we would have fixed the problem. Unfortunately there was no warning. To then add insult to injury, there were no backups made because the server was outside of the corporate firewall and did not have its own firewall. Our tape backup unit could not communicate with a server outside of the firewall. It was not a pleasant experience. Using Undelete we were able to recover all the files that appeared to be deleted by the hacker.

Thanks for your interest."

Carl Winkler
US Dept of Commerce
NTIA
Washington, DC

We are a quasi-judicial tribunal holding and producing all kinds of documents submitted in court in order to support the decision process on commercial issues submitted by Canadian citizens. Those documents are in many cases very sensitive and should be protected and available to the court staff before and during a hearing.

We have experienced being able to handle unexpected data loss. Just before Christmas an angry employee left the company. When she came back during the weekend to pick up her personal stuff she decided to do a real cleanup of any files where she was having access on the network. So, SURPRISE on Monday morning, in a very short period of time, we have recuperated all the missing files and the production has restarted quickly. Of course reloading the backup tapes was a solution but it is really a pain. Thanks to Executive Software and it's Undelete program.

Of course, I do recommend Undelete to others; this is a kind of tool that every system administrator MUST have installed on the servers.

Tom Whitestone
Promethean Software Corporation
Fitchburg, MA
tom@prometheancorporation.com

We downloaded Undelete v2 in an emergency situation when I had accidentally deleted a 10 MB file off of our Windows 2000 Server. It was very easy to install and use, and I had the file back in a matter of minutes from the time I placed my order. Overall, I was extremely happy with your program. I deleted the file in question from my workstation (Windows 2000 Professional) over the network on our primary server (Windows 2000 Server) which interestingly enough does not even give you a file delete warning. I'm a software developer for a small company in Massachusetts.

Hampton Keathley IV
Galaxie Software

"Undelete saved my life, or at least saved me a ton of time. I thought I was copying my customer access database file to another directory to test a SQL update statement on my database, to make sure I wouldn't mess it up. When I saw that the SQL statement worked, I deleted the database file and went back to the main database directory but the original wasn't there. What I had done was "move" it when I dragged it to the test directory. Since this was done on network drives, I couldn't use Undelete on my workstation or the server. I had a backup that was a couple days old, but it would have taken a day or two to manually rebuild the order history and the online store would have been down that whole time.

I searched the web from Google, found one program that was $300. Then found yours and knew you guys had the excellent Diskeeper product, and liked your price much better. So, I ordered it online, downloaded it, undeleted the database file, put it back where it belonged and was back in business in about 30 minutes.

I already have told a few others about my screw up and your great program. The machine that I lost the file on was my web server. It was the access database file that stores all of our customer files and online orders."

Hampton Keathley IV
Galaxie Software