Tomorrow night I have a presentation to make for the local C# group. So today, I was touching up the slide deck for it.

And without thinking, I noticed a few extra files cluttering my desktop.

Not being the kind of person that keeps a cluttered desktop, I quickly selected the extra items and deleted. And since I find it so annoying to have to go clear my Recycle Bin all the time, I used "shift-delete" to really nuke em good.

Then it dawned on me.

One of those files was my powerpoint deck for tomorrow. And no, no backup of it anywheres.

Luckily, I found a free delete recovery tool on the internet. Unluckily, the simple act of downloading said tool to my hard disk actually overwrote a few of the sectors where my deleted file once resided. I was able to recover it - but powerpoint could not read it since it was mangled with bits of my IE cache.

After trying everything I could think of (even commercial recovery tools), I eventually was able to get powerpoint to open it up so that I could at least read about 75% of the text. Formatting, images, and anything else was lost to the ether, and there were about 200 extra slides of gibberish... but I could at least see what I had typed previously (or most of it).

So, 4 hours of transcribing later, I have a presentation on my hands again. What sucks though is that its now 2am and I have to be up in like 4 hours to make it to work on time...