HELP!!!URGENT!lost data at work!

Hi people!

This is my first post obviously. This forum was suggested to me at another non computer related forum... I need some help and trying to get it.

Ok so, guys upgraded our system to Windows 7 finally(my choice was that they downgrade 8 to 7 because of employees)
Yes, legitimate it guys from a company we hired. ...and they of course did backups...

The trouble is that one by one employees are coming to me asking where are their folders and documents! Someone lost 1, 2, 3, 5 folders with bunch of serious documents!
I tried recovery date with EasyRecovery but documents aren't there at all.
Of course I called those IT guys and they are basically saying: "Well, there are no documents at all on our disk and there's nothing we can do if you already tried recovery!"

People are pissed off and they blame me because I was responsible for procurement!

Is there anything, I mean anything we can do to recover those documents!?

Help!

and thank you in advance!

 

Ok, so you had the users on Windows 8 and then downgraded to Windows 7? Really it is the IT guys you hired problem as they are responsible to be sure either the saved data is actually saved or at least image the entire drive(s). This is of little consequence to you now if the documents are gone.

If they went from Windows 8 to Windows 8 then most likely they went from a GPT to a MBR boot setup and this means most, if not all, conventional recovery solutions will not work. Someone more familiar with Windows 8 may be able to help there. I would ask the IT guys to be sure.

 

hi and welcome to nbr

hopefully you will get some advise from the experts but while you wait can you tell everyone what sort of buisiness it is.
what laptops you use and are they on a network or individually connected to the internet.

recovery software is good but the free stuff does only the basics. i use tune up utilitys which has a guntmun shreader and also a high quality (as far as i know as ive never had to use it) recovery tool.
when you do any sort of recovery the files can be called all sorts of things and wont have their original names or locations so its a case of opening each file retreived.

overall the company you hired should be held accountable especially if they were meant to have made a backup of each drive first. sounds like you picked a mickey mouse company.

 

sorry I wasn't clear enough. Previous system was XP.
We bougth the licence for 8.1 but I wanted them to downgrade it to 7 because employees aren't that much into IT

 

Let me get this clear.

1. The computers were initially XP.
There is no clear path to an update from XP to Windows 8.1. It means a complete wipe and then install. Data would have been backed up so that users could have access to it in their new systems.

2. If the employees found Windows 8.1 unusable, then for a Windows 7 downgrade, data has to be backed up again. There is no compromise here. There are very clear chances that data can be lost permanently.
This is the responsibility of the IT guys you brought in.

If this was done, then the contract should have covered the complete back up and data transfer to the now Windows 7 machines.

Is this what happened?

If so, then you are still not to be blamed as the company that did the downgrade is responsible for the work. what is important is that the work done was not satisfactory if the contract covers data loss. You will have to call them in for help.

 

ok... we don't have laptops, we have computers.

I work in a public institution

sorry again, I was too upset with the whole situation (because there are more problems) and I really didn't payed attention that this is for laptop and notebooks forum

 

you are correct for everything you wrote... but people are blaming me because I was responsible for the procurement and they need someone to blame...

I really have no one in our company to rely on...Our IT guy is ...hm... I don't know how to describe him...

I'll just copy what I wrote on another forum about him..........


We don't have IT department, we have an IT guy and me (me, because I know a thing or two and I'm doing tones of work instead of our IT guy because... well... because!!!
(I don't understand him, not at all... And I really have a moral dilemma about him and his job.)

An hour ago I almost cried in front of dozens people waiting in line for some documents, because he was "repairing some link" from 7 a.m. till noon and couldn't fix it because the phone is on the other side of the office! What!? 6 computers were completely out of order and people couldn't get their birth certificates and similar documents (marriage and else)
I tried to speak with him, to explain, to help, but nope...
Then, after a half of hour talking with him I gave up and called an IT guy who is in another city (D)and he fixed the issue on one computer via Team Viewer and leave our IT guy (G) to do the job he's done and show to G what needs to be done, on other computers. G could do that early this morning (call D!!!) and I'm really not sure why oh why he didn't do that earlier!

I've just called our IT guy (G), he said: I've just fixed one computer and working on another..
I: I know D fixed that one computer. How long will it take to fix another one?
G: well, the same as this one...the whole day... there's so much to be done

(D fixed it in 20 minutes via Team Viewer!!!!)

* going to kill myself right now!

 

The company that did the back up should still have copies of the entire data on the old systems. You must also have a back up of the entire data in your office. Please have them come and restore the data one more time. If the initial data back up was done correctly, then you should be able to recover the complete set of lost files.

This is going to be futile. The help we can provide is very limited. People trying to blame you is downright abominable behavior when there is no blame on you.

 

These posts are correct, if you knew enough to foresee the data issue with the outside company then you probably would have known enough to prevent it or just do this all yourself. The fault is in no way yours but the company that did the installations. In the end you have to deal with the aftermath, which of course bites a big one.

XP can be a bit of a pain with documents. Now it sounds like the link to be restored is for a small networked drive. Are the documents the others are looking for on that or another networked drive?

 

Guys, let's inject a dose of reality here. First of all, the owners are responsible for their data, period, end of sentence. No outside company, and I mean none at all, will take responsibility for lost data. You may want to read the contract you have signed with them. Anyone who knows the first thing about IT, no, make that anyone who should be allowed to touch a computer in a professional setting, will know to back up their data before allowing any outside party to touch their computers, let alone do something as drastic as upgrade the operating system. Bottom line, assuming it is the responsibility of your "IT guy" to deal with IT at your place, then it is him, and him alone, who is to blame for the problem.

As for the issue you describe, sorry, based on your unclear description of what actually happened (in fairness, you probably do not have access to the complete information anyway) most likely there's nothing anybody can do to get your data back, unless you have a backup somewhere. Not having a backup of vital data, of course, borders on criminal neglect. Sorry for the harsh words, but there's just no way to sugarcoat this. Good luck.

 

MMaria, are you running any type of network? If not I would highly suggest investing in one or at least have a document backup drive for every user. Then the employees need to get in the habit of backing up their work. From what you wrote I assume users are saving data to local hard drive at this point, which is fine as long a everything is backed up to an external flash drive, hard drive or a network drive. If backups were in fact done you should simply be able to restore any missing data easily. I would contact whoever is in charge of the company you hired and get access to these backups. Good luck! When I was involved in a similar scenario (Win 3. to XP) I personally backed up all the executives' hard drives just in case anything went wrong.

 

Couldn't have said it better myself.... I have to agree with Pirx on this problem ... The Users themselves should always backup to another device just incase never think one storage medium will do. Failure to do basic backup and just like Pirx said - is the end results.

 

Agreed in a perfect world there would have been a true IT to take care of this. She does not have one, where as the company who apparently offered to make backups apparently does not have the data. If the other company were not to make backups then yes it is the users fault. Whenever data is important though there should always be a data backup schedule in place where the files can then be retrieved. Of course this would have been best practice even going forward.

Since it is a link to get the other data being restored is why I ask if there is a network drive, even for the work files. This is common place where a drive is not mapped properly and thereby breaks links. If this is true this would also explain why there are no files to recover and why the original backups have no files there either.

Now a back step though, if your supposed IT guy was working with that company he could easily be at fault as well. I say this in as if he took a day and did not get the link working and the other real IT guy only took 20 minutes on a remote access, well that speaks volumes.

 

Guys, you were very nice. Thanks!

IT guys did backup on an external hard drive and the other partition (backup) on computers has My documents and Desktop files.
When I did recovery on one computer, it showed some deleted files but not some of the folders or files she (the user of the computer) remembered by name.
A woman had f.e. folders "2014" and "legal assistance" and they weren't shown either with EasyRecovery or on his external drive. We (I and IT guy who did backup) were speaking on the phone and he was telling me what he has on his drive. Interesting is also that some of the backuped files were shown on her computer but not on his drive.


We have 52 computers now and 4 departments with, of course, different demands.

And now about the "link" situation... not related to backup issues but other issues.
In one department there are 6 computers with network/connected to the states register/excuse my ignorance... When I called that another IT guy who was doing the job via TeamViewer he said that there aren't supposed to be any troubles and that he doesn't understand why our guy needs whole day ... because all he needs to do is change hssl? file and copy that file on the rest of those computers (if I remember it correctly, he needs to put ip addresses there or something) I know a thing or two about computers but I know nothing about what I'm trying to explain you now so please forgive me


The hardest thing though is dealing with unhappy people!

The mentioned woman was a former chief of department and she's just a panic type. The documents that she lost aren't that big of a deal (yes they are but...) because she has all those printed and archived. She needs to type them again and use them as templates. She also mentioned that she has some of the documents on her usb stick drive, but she won't tell how many or what. She called her chief, told him she lost everything, she can't manage even to write a new document because they changed everything. She's claiming she doesn't know how to use new Word... She'll write to our superior and so on... so on.... and i'm really not good with dealing with that kind of people.

The second type is a woman I work with in office. She's rude and doesn't care about her vocabulary. She attacked the guy, who run away from her, looking for me to go back in office (I was on a meeting). She was threatening and calling names.

And the third type is a woman who didn't even tell she lost some documents. I heard that from another woman.

Our IT guy in this whole story is completely lost. I kind of feel sorry for him, but then again I'm also mad at him, which makes my life even harder. I just want him to tell me "I don't know how to do this" and I'll know where we stand. This way he makes everything more complicated!

 

I just want something to say... Even if we don't fix these issues, you guys helped me a lot in a sense not to feel that bad about this whole situation. I was acting completely as if this was my fault

 

ive got this to look forward too. hospital with over 3800 computer are all being upgraded from XP to windows 7 within the next 4 months.
at least weve got a cold room with 8 x 500tb backup drives. 2 of them are almost full with dicom digital xray scans.

as i said earlier, when tools are used to bring back deleted items some will most probably be renamed with various letters and number instead of what they used to be called.
ive only ever had to use a recovery tool once for thousands of photo's that were deleted of a friends computer.
each one was named in various folders before they were deleted. every single one had to be opened and new folders started and then sorted back into their appropriate order. nightmare but we got there in the end.

so there is still hope maria.

 

Most of everything I could have said has been said, so I won't rehash everything.

I will however say both for you and others who may read this, while NBR is a laptop forum, Windows problems can usually apply to both laptops or desktops, so there is nothing to be sorry about for posting about those kind of issues.

If someone's boss comes at you because they "lost everything", stay calm and explain that you have to documents archived in paper format so it's not the apocalypse. You'll at least be able to get most of the stuff back. If they have half an ounce of sense, they'll see the other person was freaking out and being unreasonable even though they had a right to be angry about the whole situation (it isn't fun after all).

 

I was kind of nervous since this was my first post and I don't know the forum but you were really helpful. I might ask you something else soon

This whole IT situation since I came to work here (October last year) made me more curious about this subject. I learned a lot and more I learn, more I want to learn more.

I was in complete shock when I started the procurement for new computers and software. I had to make a list of all the working computers. You wouldn't believe on what computers some people were working, their ram was 512 mb f.e. and they were complaining for years but no one was listening them.
In one office there are three computers and two people working. Why they need the third computer? Well it serves them for printing only. It has to be turned in so they can print! absurd!

What is also a problem, people don't know what the previous or this current guy did on their computer, they don't understand nor anyone explained to them...

I know nothing about servers, but I'm tempted to learn... but then again, that's not my job at all... but then again, I'm curious....

Thanks again for being nice to me...


3800 computers!? oh God!

 

If it is on paper it may be time to get a good OCR software suit.

 

oh it gets worse.
i didnt know we had that many computers but it is 3800 in my hospital trust alone. we are linked to 2 more smaller hospitals and will be merging in 7 weeks to another hospital so making us the largest trust in the UK
the bad news is the other hospitals will all be linked and they have another 4500 desktops.

thank god i work in xray and will only have my department to update. all i can say is good luck IT team

 

^ from my heart, good luck to you guys!