URGENT HELP! Is there any way to recover a deleted save?

[datubaman]

I am in a panic right now because I accidentally deleted a very important save in game and I need to know if there is any way to recover it. It is NOT in the Recycle Bin and I am really at a loss as to what to do. I need to know, is there any way for me to recover it? I would also take this time to suggest that there should be a "recover deleted save" option in KSP, where all deleted saves are moved to a separate folder within the saves folder into which saves marked for deletion would go where they would spend at least 3 days in before being deleted permanently. Please, if I don't recover this save I will have essentially lost several months worth of work. Please help me.

[problemecium]

First, avoid making any new files wherever possible. Unfortunately your browser will do that automatically as you proceed, but that's inevitable.

Try a deleted file recovery utility such as "PC Inspector File Recovery", which scans the empty spaces on your hard drive for data that "looks like" a file. If you're lucky, you can scrounge together some ships and SFS files that have yet to be overwritten.

As you may know, when a file is "deleted", typically it is just un-linked from the operating system and directory tree, but the data remains on the hard drive and is just considered "unused space". Thus it is possible as mentioned above to restore it as long as nothing else has been written in its place - unless of course you have an anti-virus software that "shreds" or "securely deletes" files, in which case the data is scrambled and can probably only be recovered by forensics.

Good luck! :\

[jarmund]

Sounds to me like your best bet is undeletion. How to do this depends on the filesystem in use, but I'm willing to bet 20$ that you're using NTFS, in which case I would recommend a program named GetDataBack.

If it's ext3, I would go for a combination of grep, strings, head and tail.

Either way, the important bit is named persistent.sfs.

In addition to the above, some steps should be taken:

STOP USING THE HARDDRIVE IN QUESTION. Every time a write-operation is done to the drive, changes are that the space on the drive where the actual data is, will be overwritten. It is therefore recommended to connect the drive as secondary, build an image from it, and then do the recovery operation based on the image. This way, you can do what you want without having to worry about overwrites.

[Tex_NL]

How exactly did it get deleted? Did you remove the save from the game or were you messing around in the KSP game folders?

If you manually removed it from the folders this could be a lot easier than you might expect.

Go to your KSP folder and open the folder called 'saves'. Inside should be folders called 'scenarios' and 'training' plus any current games. If your game name is still there you're in luck. Open your folder and look for 'quicksave.sfs'. Duplicate this file and rename it 'persistent.sfs'. Close the folder and start your game.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

an app called Recuva (google it) can un-erase files