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Recepies lost after formatting HD

Rocksolid

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To make a long story short:

I did a backup copy of the actual beersmith install then, I formatted my C drive.
After reinstalling the OS and BS the recipes were gone, even when started from the backup. What I didn't know was that my files were saved in "Documents" on the C drive. Which of course was the system disc that was formatted.

I did however manage to find a program that recovered my deleted files from the formatted drive and restored them.

There are several types of recipe files and I did just as you also describedand in other posts and renamed those old files and moved to the new directory.
Beersmith however cant open the files in question. It says "Error importing file" on any file i try to open which was recovered.

Are thees files somehow corrupted?
 
Didn't you make a backup of all old documents, pictures and user files? Typically, new OS procedures at least prompt you to do so, if not to a disc or cloud automagically. Perhaps you have older backups somewhere? Perhaps you have some recipes on the BeerSmith cloud? Half of something is better than all of nothing.

It's hard to say if the files are corrupted. Depending on how you reformatted and how much new data you added to the hard drive, will determine the success of recovering old files intact. The most basic reformat only erases the file management tree in the disc root file. A Full Format tests all of the disc sectors which involves writing and then reading small bits of data, which makes those file areas unrecoverable. Depending on the OS you used to reformat, the disc might not be recoverable.

Once you started to add the OS and user programs in addition to BeerSmith, the data was overwriting all old files encountered as needed for new files. Whatever old file space was needed by the new programs and their files is now lost, unfortunately.

Look at the names of the recovered files. They should all be [file].bsmx. They should look like: Recipe.bsmx or Equipment.bsmx or age.bsmx and so forth. BeerSmith makes its own backups with a simple number scheme: Recipe1.bsmx; Recipe2.bsmx and the same for any other user file. If the backup added extra characters to the names, then just rename the file.

Unfortunately, if the files are correctly names and still don't open, then it does sound like the files are lost.
 
Yes, i recovered several bsmx, bsmx2 and so forth files. I cant open either of them.
I got a file which is 874kb big which i think was my latest save and i cant open that either.

Al tho i heard bsmx is a kind of XML file, which i should be able to open in some other program which opens XML files and perhaps recover some information that way?
 
Try using File->Open in BeerSmith to open the BSMX files.  When you find your data, copy/paste the items back into My Recipes in the program.

Brad
 
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