If you are an AVG user and have yet to upgrade to v8, and especially if you use Thunderbird, please know this:
From AVG (as found on
mozillaZine):
"Dear Sir/Madam,
"thank you for your email.
"If there is an archive (Thunderbird Inbox is archive too) which
contains some virus whole archive is moved to the Virus Vault.
Unfortunately, there was a problem with archives bigger then 5MB. Such
as archives were deleted from disk but the they were not stored to the
Virus Vault. Therefore it is not possible to restore the Inbox from
the the vault in such as situation.
"This problem has been already solved and the fix will be in the next
public program update.
"Please note that there is new beta version with this fix (and much
more) on our beta protal available. For more information please see
this web page:
http://www.avg.com/beta"We are sorry for inconvenience it may cause you and thank you for
understanding.
"Answers to the most common questions can be found here as well:
http://www.avg.com/faq/"Best regards,
"AVG Technical Support"
I installed the update 2 days (!) ago after enduring the nagging screen for a while. The first scan ran yesterday. I come home and there's no files in the Inbox (had thousands of mails). I check out scan history and sure enough the whole Inbox has been deleted by AVG because of a suspected virus. I did have a full backup of the C: drive, but my terrible mistake was to keep it on another internal disk, which AVG scanned as well - and in the process disappeared my backup, too.
I stayed up very late installing and running trial versions of recovery software. I was hopeful that I'd be able to at least recover the backup Inbox as that drive has not seen any write activity since this happened, but all I can find is an Inbox file of 0 bytes in size. (
)
I have not lost everything, I have subfolders that are intact for messages from family, and once a day I retrieve my mail from the server through my yahoo account online, but many years worth of hard to categorize mails (inluding account information for websites) and history is gone, just like that. I've had AVG for years, but it's getting uninstalled as soon as I can find a viable replacement. What really ticks me off is that they've known about this for weeks, but they are still allowing people to download and run the version with the fatal bug, no warning.
Please take care and make multiple backups to multiple media. Yes, it's a pain and it's something that needs to be done on a schedule, but when disaster strikes, you'll be glad you took the time
Small update: AVG renames files in the vault to <something>.fil, so I guess I had been looking for the wrong file. Still not sure if I can just restore it if I place a recovered .fil file in the vault directory. But that assumes I can find the renamed and deleted inbox file in the first place...
Another update: I found this free tool:
PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery. Will try it tonight. If it works, I'll be highly impressed as some of the other software costs a small fortune.
