I work for a real estate company and we recently had some employees leave the company and take some of our database records with them, and delete ours.

Yes, I did make backups, but.... I stored them in a shared location on the company network (My Mistake), and one of our employees deleted them.

Does anyone know of an undelete utility for MS Acess Database (.mdb) records?

I have most of the records, but they deleted all of the new clients, the ones we don't have recorded elsewhere.You won't be able to roll back Access to an earlier version, but you may be able to recover the deleted files. If this is mission critical for you, you MUST IMMEDIATELY take the drive in question OFFLINE. I cannot emphasise this enough. Install PC Inspector File Recovery on another drive and then plug the offline drive in as a secondary drive. You can then run the file recovery program to recover *.mdb files on the secondary drive.

PLEASE consider porting your databases to SQL. MySQL is free and provides much more robust data storage.

PLEASE review your security procedures. It SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE for ANY EMPLOYEE to delete your mission-critical databases.

I know this is shutting the stable door after the horse is bolted, but hopefully you can learn from this painful experience and avoid future disasters.Thank you for the Idea, I will do my best for recovering my files. I realize what I did was a mistake. I have already taken the hard drive offline.

Thank you for your help.

Have a nice day.No problem; we'd be interested to know how you get on.

Good luck!Well... My BOSS said there was no chance in "heck" that he was going to fire me. He knew when I started that I wasn't someone with a lot of experience. I used the utility you recommended, only to find that the files were corrupted. I did however find some .ldb files that I will look into, maybe as proof of who stole our files to begin with.

I appreciate all of the help, and it is likely that I will use this site in the future.The ldb files would only give you locking information - i.e. who was using the database at the time it went walkies.

Can you cope without the data? If not, there are some other options, but they tend to be expensive.The data that was deleted was the data for new clients that haven't been put into houses yet. My Boss is very upset because we just spent about $5500 in advertising, and about 1/4 of the clients they stole were brought in by those advertisements.

How expensive are we talking. for the other options?You'd need to get a quote from a data recovery expert - and because they need physical access to the drive, you'd have to look for someone in your area, really.

Are you sure that the mdb files were corrupted? Did you have no hard copies of the data?No, I didn't have any hard copies of the data, I feel like an idiot. I will attempt to see if there are any data recovery experts in the area.

Thank you for all of your help.Hey, no problem. It happens to everyone once. You're only an idiot if you let it happen again. The PAIN will pass soon enough; then you've got another I.T. war story to tell over a beer.

I once had a server hard drive die on me (in fact I accidentally killed it). I had backups of everyone's work - EXCEPT for my boss's. Oops.