Chromatography Forum

This is super important and has been making me depressed for about a week because these results are super important for my PhD and involved a ton of work. Right before my lab shut down, I ran over 300 samples and started analyzing the data remotely from home afterwards. Not being 100% dialed in, I idiotically deleted the sample set of data. While the project is intact, the sample set (raw data and results) are gone.

How this is possible is beyond me as most softwares will have safety mechanisms or the ability to still access raw data. Can anyone possibly help me in recovering this or let me know where it might be possible to access this data? I would greatly appreciate any advice! Tried to reach out to Waters but we don’t have a service contract so they refused to help at all...

Hi
- of course you don't have a backup of the project yet?
- and you were logged into Empower with admin privilege?
- or someone configured that the user has the delete raw data privilege?
- even then, Empower normally asks if you really want to delete the data
- is it a server installation or workstation only?

I'm not sure if they can be recovererd as Empower is an oracle database and not sure what happens when the according metadata is not present?

But the raw data channels are in the project folder under C:\empower\projects or similar depending how the database was configured.
Maybe you can recover the raw ".dat" files on the disk with some data recovery software tools and then see, if they can somehow imported back into empower?

Maybe on the oracle basis there may be some way to recover delted data from a database? (but when the dat-file are gone, it doubt there are any references in oracle left)

Maybe the Empower audit trails give some more information about what exactly has happened.

Just guesses