I'm going to take a short break from the Oracle/SQL Server controversy to talk about file recovery. This doesn't necessarily apply to DBs, but then again, it can under the right circumstances. I was writing a process to ship trace files to another server for analyzing and I had the line commented out that actually inserts them into the table and all I did was delete them. OK, fine. So what to do. Well, not long I’m going to take a short break from the Oracle/SQL Server controversy to talk about file recovery. This doesn’t necessarily apply to DBs, but then again, it can under the right circumstances. I was writing a process to ship trace files to another server for analyzing and I had the line commented out that actually inserts them into the table and all I did was delete them. OK, fine. So what to do. Well, not long ago I got my copy of Undelete Server from Diskeeper so I decided what better test than to try it on a real production mistake? So I loaded it on my server and it ran in emergency mode, which doesn’t copy any files to the hard drive. If you have a CD it’ll run from there, but I just ran it from a separate partition. Anyway, I just pointed it at the folder that had the files deleted and it brought them all up in the window with their original file names. All the undelete programs I’ve seen in the past have kept the cryptic system names and you had to sift through them all to see which files you needed. And if you brought back a lot of files you had to rename them all once they were all recovered. It was a huge pain. So Undelete brought back a couple hundred files to the original location with all the original file names. There’s not a better test of a product than that for me because it actually pulled my butt out of the fire.I’m officially recommending everyone get this and put it on their servers just in case something happens. You’ll never know when you need it and like I said, even DB work can take advantage of this because when copying files at the OS layer, problems occur and things that shouldn’t get delete could be without notice. What can I say, I’m sold. Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at: https://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com Read my book reviews at: www.ITBookworm.com Blog Author of: DBA Rant – https://dbarant.blogspot.com Databases