Active@ UNDELETE to the rescue...


It's never good when you loose data ... that isn't backed up. But that's exactly what happened to some coworkers today. Except it's worse than that. Someone had deleted more than 200 GB of data off of a shared drive on a Citrix server, including Inetpub. .... Needless to say, my coworker was NOT happy.

Having run in to this type of situation before, I quickly assessed the situation and confirm what I suspected was the case. So, I immediately turned to a utility that I have used to recovered data more times than I care to admit. (Things happen like DFS & FRS going hog wild deleting files when a server reconnects that's been offline for too long.) Thankfully my old friend Active@ UNDELETE served me well yet again.

Thanks to Active@ UNDELETE being the reliable product that it is, we were able to quickly recover the Inetpub directory and work on restoring Citrix services. Unfortunately it wasn't as simple as undeleting the files and putting them back in the same place that they were in originally, because we still had 200+ GB of data left to recover. So, I worked some NTFS magic with Junction from Windows Sysinternals to create an NTFS Junction to where we restored the Inetpub. A couple restarts of IIS and NTFS permission tweaks later, Citrix was up and running again from it's new temporary home on a different drive. Thus allowing us to continue recovering the remaining data.