Right before my lab shut down, I ran several samples using Empower 3 and started analyzing the data remotely from home afterwards. Without realizing what I was doing, I 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...
This has nothing to do with Water's software and everything to do with computer and its use. Do you have a formal data backup system setup for your analytical instrument data? You should. If you do not, then you may want to install one for future.
First, determine if the data is truly "lost". If you have not done so already, please look in the data folder where you have specified that the data be stored to see if a the files still exist. They may in fact be there, but some corruption could have occurred on the hard drive which is not allowing the software to read it. Sometimes this corruption is easy to fix as only the directory data is lost. Other times, the corruption could be more serious. If the data files are not where you expect them, then run a file search to see if they exist on the computer data drives.
How did you delete the data? Did you delete it from within Empower, or delete the files from the drive?
If you deleted it from the local drive:
Some of the HPLC software I know of uses some kind of relational database to keep track of the data, so deleting it from within Empower may have deleted the files and the way to access them via their user interface. I don't have many suggestions in this case as they tend to lock those databases down to maintain data integrity.
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