File Geodatabase Recovery

SpencerLarson · ‎05-20-2014

I recently copied and pasted a file geodatabase using windows explorer from one location to another location. After doing so I deleted the original file. When I try to open or access the geodatabase in the new location it shows just a folder in ArcCatalog or ArcMap. Using windows explorers I can see that the files that make up the geodatabase are there, it just seems based upon my previous readings of other forums that maybe not all the files got pasted and were possibly in use even though I wasn't running sessions of ArcMap or ArcCatalog. I would really like to get this data back, I tried adding the gdb file that was missing but I get the error failed to connect to geodatabase or that its the wrong version even though both geodatabases were creating in ArcGIS 10. Any suggestions....?

SpencerLarson · ‎05-21-2014

Lance- If you provide a FTP site where I can post the files or I can send you a link to a location where you can download to take a better look with what I am dealing with on my end. Additionally do you think running a data recovery software would be of any use to track down geodatabase, if the last known occurence there was a potential for some of the files to be locked while I did that copy and paste which caused my current issue to occur (unusable geodatabase files)?

Spencer

LanceShipman · ‎05-21-2014

Your best bet is to contact Technical Support and they will get the data to me as part of the incident. If you can use data recovery software to recover the files just before the copy, you may be good. If there is no system lock (windows locks the files if they are open by another process). The file geodatabase lock files are simply empty tables and if they are not active will be overwritten. My e-mail address is lshipman@esri.com.

A note on locking is that the locks are by process, not user. So if you have several desktop sessions open, accessing the same data, there can be lock conflicts. We suggest that ArcGIS be used for copying file geodatabases because we handle the locking (both our locking and window locking) cleanly.