Recovering grades

Summer, for the school system, is not a time of rest and fun. No friends, it is a crazy time of working fast and trying to get everything ready for the fall. The frenzied work can really be seen in the IT department. Computers have to be ghosted (updated WinXP, new software, etc.), wireless controllers/AP’s installed and new network equipment is set up.

This year was made even more fun because all of the high school teachers had their own laptops. The laptops were taken up the day after the last day of school. An email went out to all of the teachers and principals letting them know when and where to bring their laptops. The email also informed them to back up any important data to their user directory because the laptops were going to be reloaded.

One teacher got a little too delete happy. When he brought his laptop to us, he said, “I accidentally deleted all of the final grades for my class.” What!?!?! That’s right people. Instead of uploading his grade file daily to the grades server, he kept them on his laptop so he could work on them at home and only uploaded every 9 weeks. That’s a bad practice in and of itself. We asked him why he did that but he didn’t really have a good answer (shock?).

So what did we do? We Recuva‘d (bad form, booooooooo) his files. Recuva is made by the same company that makes CCleaner and Defraggler. Recuva can be installed on the local machine or carried on a portable drive (just copy the extracted executable). I took the hard drive out of the teacher’s laptop and put it in an external enclosure the school technician had. The drive was then connected to the tech’s laptop, which I had downloaded Recuva onto, and we ran the deep scan to see if we could retrieve the file.

Recuva has a really nice GUI that shows you if a file can be recovered or if it has already been overwritten by other files. Thankfully, the grade file that held all of the class final grades was able to be recovered. The teacher was happy because that saved him a weekend of re-entering all of the grades manually. I was happy because that’s one more person that owes me a favor.