A university student from Milton Keynes has described her 'panic' after accidentally deleting 4,000 words of degree work… the day before she was due to hand it in!

Anxious Anna Williams thought she had lost more than half her thesis on occupational therapy when overwriting a file on her laptop with an earlier version from a memory stick.

Luckily for the 20-year-old, who lives in Bancroft, her plight was picked up by Elizabeth Sheldon, director of Milton Keynes-based Evidence Talks, which just happens to be one of the country's leading forensic computing firms.

Elizabeth put one of her most experienced data recovery experts on the case, and he managed to rescue the deleted file the same day.

Anna, who is studying at Brunel University, said: "I thought, 'I'm in trouble now'. How was I going to get it back? I couldn't possibly remember everything I had written over the previous few days. I tried everything I could think of, including doing a system restore, but nothing worked."

Elizabeth said: "Anna got lots of emails from wellwishers telling her to download various pieces of recovery software, but that's the classic mistake. You should NEVER download anything to the media containing the lost file as it might overwrite the information you are trying to recover.

"It was a real pleasure to help Anna. She had clearly put in a lot of hard work and it would have been a shame if that had gone for good. The fact that we got hold of the computer so quickly undoubtedly helped us to recover 100 per cent of the data."

A relieved Anna said: "I was so happy to get all that hard work back. I can't thank the people at Evidence Talks enough – they were so helpful."

>> Evidence Talks is making a habit of saving students. The company recently rescued a woman – who must remain anonymous – working on her PhD at a huge multinational corporation.

She thought she had been backing up her work to a network server, but a malicious employee had altered the settings so that a copy was being saved to her own machine instead.

When the student's laptop gave up the ghost she thought one year's work had gone down the drain, but again the boffins at Evidence Talks saved the day.

>> To find out more about Evidence Talks, visit www.evidencetalks.com or click here.

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