Hello all,

I have a Macbook Pro that is 3 years old. A few months ago, the computer basically died (it stopped booting up because the startup disk was presumably corrupted). In the process of recovering the files from the damaged hard drive, my work's IT department recovered several Excel .xls files (they were named D and a series of numbers, like 'D00642.xls'). I do not know what data recovery software they used.

There are several issues with these recovered files. First, these files look very similar to an existing file on the computer. However, there are several ways in which these files are different. First, the content of several of the cells in both files are different from the existing file. Second, these files have lost their metadata, as their creation and last modified dates are listed as the date the files were recovered, and the author information for the files is missing.

The existing file was from several months before my computer died. In the meantime, I used Excel for at least an hour a day every day, having saved Excel files countless times in the intervening months. Reading up on data recovery, it seems like the longer you go using and saving with a given program, the more likely that the files recovered have undergone significant data corruption and overwriting.

I am trying to understand what these files represent--how likely is it that these recovered files have undergone significant data corruption and overwriting?

Madhu