One of NetWares most useful utilities is the Salvage utility, which is kind of a trade secret. One day a user will delete a couple of files or a complete directory accidentally, of course, and it will be the job of the LAN administrator to save the day because the files were the company's financial statements and they are due in a meeting yesterday. The NetWare 3.12 and 4.X SALVAGE utility is the extremely useful and sophisticated tool to recover these files.
NetWare retains deleted files in the volume were the files originally resided. There they continue to pile up until the deleted files completely saturate this volume. When the volume becomes full with these images of the deleted files, the system begins purging, starting with the files that have been deleted for the longest period of time. The only exception to this, is files or directories that have been tagged with the purge attribute.
As you can imagine these hidden deleted files can quickly eat up the space on a hard drive and the administrator will need to keep an eye on these so that the system is not unduly slowed down by the system purging to make room for saved and working files. These deleted files can also be purged manually with the SALVAGE utility, which is a great way to make sure that a file you don't want others to see is completely removed from the system!!!
For a user or administrator to retrieve a file using SALVAGE, the create right (right to edit and read a directory area or file) must be assigned to the directory in which the file resides. If the directory still exists, the files are put back into the directory from which they were deleted. If the file being salvaged has...