Recovering deleted files?

I like a 25 year old game called Masters of Orion. It is okay to make fun of me; my sons certainly do.
It crashes from time to time, but if you start it up again and tell it to continue it will resume the game a few turns back. I suffer from ADD and dyslexia and have a tendency to tell it to start a new game instead of continuing. I then lose my old game that I was well into.

Years ago I had (I think) PCTools that had an undelete function. I could then just undelete my old game and continue it. I have recently tried a few undelete programs, but I get like 28,000 deleted files, but not my games. Is there a free software that would work like PCTools did? I told it to look for *.gam files and it would come up with a bunch; the most recent date/time would be the one I want.

Thanks much.

Toller said:

Masters of Orion

Great game, my compliments on your refined and sophisticated taste :)

Unless I'm missing something, the Windows Recycle Bin will do what you want.

Right-click it, select one of the 'Open' choices, sort the files by date in descending order—newest date first—and your game file should be there at the top.

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CountMike said:

I don't think you can retrieve it like that. Starting new game overwrites old settings and saves, there's nothing that can reverse that.

Ah, you snuck in under cover :)

I agree, that's my thought too, I'm not aware of games deleting files—but then again, that was 25 years ago.

Toller, my guess is that PCTools ran a regular backup for you, so you could always find a recent game copy in its archives—like what CountMike suggests.

If I had your situation, I'd ask someone to write a little 'Batch File' which would do the following:

Start MOO;
On you quitting MOO, run a file backup of the folder where MOO saves its savegame;
Quit.

Make a desktop shortcut to the Batch File, and you're done—launch MOO from the shortcut in future.