Today at work, I accidentally deleted my entire local web server root due to a ANT sync task that I had setup incorrectly.

I searched online for a way to recover these files since ANT doesn’t send them to the recycle bin or anything. I quickly came across a very nice, fast, easy- to-use file recovery application called Recova. I was happy to see that it was FREE as well.

I downloaded and installed it right away and began scanning. It found all the files that ANT had deleted within a couple of minutes. I was even able to filter on the path. Selection of the files was as easy as a single checkbox at the top to select everything. I click the button to start to recover and was going to choose the same disk that the files came from–it warned me this would not be a good idea because I could possibly overwrite the deleted files. I changed the directory to a different disk and chose to have it maintain folder structure.

It worked perfectly and now I am back up and running in less than 30 minutes. I have an ongoing backup, the issue with that is that it only occurs once a day and so had I restored from that, I would have lost my work from part of yesterday. This recovery was possible because the files had just been deleted.

Also, I would like to note that I was in Windows. Naturally, if I was on my Mac, I would have used Time Machine :-P