Vista - How to undelete a User

Recently transferred all the data from an XP to a Vista home basic at the local church. Took two tries and I renamed the new User on the Vista machine Secretary, I used Lesa the first try. After successfully getting all the data transferred, and all programs working, the outgoing secretary deleted my new User account Secretary, thinking all the data was under her name Lesa.
I need to get the user account Secretary, undeleted/restored. I tried the restore to an earlier date but that did not restore the user secretary.

Long story, any ideas???

Overloaded

The user account "Secretary", and all data it contained, is for all intents and purposes, gone.

What you can perhaps do is navigate through the "C:\Users" folder, and hope that when Lesa deleted the "Secretary" user account, she didn't specify to delete the files also.

What you may have to do in order to recover that lost data is either restore from a known good backup (you do have a recent backup, don't you?), or temporarily install the hard disk onto another machine as a slave drive, and then use R-Studio Data Recovery Software to try and undelete the files.

You can get R-Studio here : Disk Recovery Software and Hard Drive Recovery tool for Windows

Just be aware that the longer you take to perform a data recovery (using any kind of tools), the greater the possibility that any recoverable data will be overwritten with sometihing else and will render that recovery useless.


And nothing personal against Lesa, but perhaps once you have gotten this problem resolved, you'll want to create an Adminstrator level account with a password on it that only you know, and then "demote" the Lesa user account to limited user status, so that you can avoid such a hiccup in the future. With limited user accounts, anytime a user tries to do something that could potentially damage the system or result in data loss, the computer will ask for an Adminstrator password instead of just asking to "Allow" or "Cancel". But also only if you have turned on UAC...

Thanks for the info. In the end you were right about the lost data. I tried to find the data with some search and recovery soft ware I had and also with the RR that was recommended. I found a lot of deleted items but not the User Secretary or the related data. I was not successful but it has been determined that most of the data can be reproduced from hard copy. I furnished pen drives for backup to 4 Users and now they understand why they should backup after ever use.

Thanks for the help,
Overloaded

If you backed up the system state, you can restore a user account. Once you delete a user, all the entries are gone under it. If you did not write anything over that area of the drive, you might be able to use undelete software to recover. Once you did a system restore, it probably overwrote that area. I would suggest doing backups of data in the future to DVD.