Recovering Files with Salvage on Novell Netware

There is a chance of recovering deleted files during the next day or so by using the Netware program Salvage. This program only operates on the Town file servers (Drive F:) and can only restore files have been explicitly saved at some time.

1. Using Salvage

When Salvage starts up, the banner at the top of the window tells, which directory is active. Press Alt / Return to have the Salvage window occupy the whole screen for better visibility.

• To select an action, use the arrow keys to highlight it
• To carry out an action, press the Return key once it has been selected.
• To cancel any option, and go back to the previous stage, press the Esc key.
• Set Salvage Options is  used to select the way in which Salvage will sort the files it finds (For e.g.: by Name or by Date).

When starting the program View / Recover Deleted Files is already selected, and then press return. A text box, Erased File Name Pattern To Match containing * meaning "all files". Press Return to list all files and directories recently deleted from a Drive whose names match the pattern that have set. Go down into subdiretories to look for files, to go back up a directory, select the .. entry.

Choose a file for recovery on the basis of its name, date, time and especially its size (if this is not similar to the orginal file, then the salvaged file is unlikely to contain anything useful). Press Return when a suitable file is highlighted to cause Salvage to place it on F drive (it will then disappear from Salvage's list). If a file of the same name already exists on F Drive, Salvage will prompt for a new name for the recovered file.

To exit Salvage, press Esc until the Exit Salvage menu appears with Yes highlighted, then press the Return key.



How successfull is Salvage at recovering deleted files?

Put rather simply, when a file is deleted, the file itself is not erased - only its record in the file catalogue is deleted. Salvage works by looking for actual files, rather than catalogue records.

Salvage works not on the PC's themselves, but on the Novell Netware-based File Servers - the TOWNs. It recovers files if any available to be recovered. There is no guarantee that any file is salvageable.

Some packages delete the old version of a file (hence, it is salvageable) before writing a new version at the request of Save command. Others just modify the existing copy; hence, nothing gets deleted and so nothing can be recovered.

Furthermore, recovery is only possible if the old file space has not yet been recycled, (i.e.) occupied by new files created by the users. The longer a file has been deleted, the more likely it is to be purged.

There are other abnormal circumstances which can cause deleted files to disappear. If the containing directory is deleted as well a the file itself, the file will be lost to Salvage.

The commonest difficulty is if Word has been set to do only fast saves. This means that it doses an in-place update of the existing file; it does not create and then delete a separate file for the previous copy. This is why, everyone should always have Word set to Always create backup copy, this generates a BAK or WBK file. Salvage is able to keep successive copies of those BAK and WBK files, by using the complete history of the document.