Repairing recovered Notebook files.

[Clarence Beeks]

Hi everyone,

A teacher in our district had a flash drive that had become problematic.  I ran a file-recovery program, and it appeared to recover all the files from the drive, except the Notebook files.  Every other file (.doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls, jpeg, etc) was recovered in its own format, just named generically (ex. FILE008.pdf, etc).  The program did create two folder of .ZIP files.  When I root around in those .ZIP files, it appears that these are Notebook files that have been totally "blown apart" into XML files, etc.  Has anyone experienced this before?  If so, is there any way to get these files "back together"?.

Thanks so much for your time!!

[Obe Hostetter]

I would contact SMART and see if they can help you.  See http://www.smarttech.com/Home%20Page/Support/Regional%20Contact

I also recommend users back up their files to at least two places in case the technology doesn't work.

[Clarence Beeks]

Thank you for the response.  I will contact them and report back here with any results.  As for backing up the files......we stress to the users to back up their files as much as possible.  We also route the "Documents" folder and Desktop to their network drives.  So, we try to prevent this as much as possible.....but we can only do so much!   :)

Thanks again.

 

 

[Randy Tran]

Hey Clarence,

One of the Notebook files' greatest non-secrets is that our file formats are really re-purposed from other existing formats.  XBK and NBK files are actually 2 different XML standards.  And as you can probably guess, Notebook files, are re-purposed ZIP files.

If you rename a Notebook file to Zip, you can actually see the contents of your Notebook file, to a degree.  The SVG files are the pages with ink and text but not the images.  The images you attach into the Notebook file, are stored inside the Images folder.  Videos get stored in the video folder, and flash applets into the flash folder.

What controls how everything should appear and in what order is the imsmanifest.xml and metadata.xml files, with the metadata.rdf and assessment.xml files controlling Response assessments and assessment data.

Going back to your inquiry though, if you have zip files that contain SVG files and some or all of the above, just rename your zip file to a .notebook file and you should be able to open it up as a notebook file.  If you don't have the pagex.svg files, it means you're not going to have slides or a lot of blank slides in your notebook file.

Lastly one advanced tip I can provide since I've provided a lot of the above information: if you are unable to open up a notebook file at anytime, rename it to a zip file.  If you are unable to open it as a zip file, it means the archive is damaged.  Simply toss the file into a hex editor and make sure that the very first two letters are "PK" (as in PKZip, the original program and originator of the zip format we all know and love).  If you do see the letters PK, you can use PKzipfix, Winrar, etc. to do a repair on the archive, and the fixed output should be able to be opened up by notebook, to 90-100% of the original file,  when you rename the fixed zip file to a notebook file.

I hope that clears things up for you on why you saw zip files instead of Notebook files, and enlightens you on some nifty things you can do with this new information.

#R

[Clarence Beeks]

Hi Randy,

 

I can't thank you enough for all that info.  I will definitely pass that around to the other techs here.  We've been making some great progress with the recovered files.  It turns out that all the .ZIP files are not just Notebook.  We've found Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, etc.  So far, all of them have opened by renaming the extension.  (By the way, the program is called EASEUS, and it's done wonders for us!!)

 

Again....thank you for your help!!