How to recover deleted files which TortoiseSVN accidentally removed?

Question

This is an accident and I don't think there's a solution. But I'm asking anyways.

I introduced SVN to our webshop and I set all the dev pc's htdocs as part of the repository. (my first mistake)

Now, one of my coworkers are working on a project and didn't commit their code to svn (second mistake). His reasoning was that he's the only one who's doing work on that site and he don't need svn (another mistake: I introduced SVN as a collaborative tool)

I instructed everyone's SOP to be: update and then checkout when starting and shutting down their PC.

Needless to say, my coworker's project disappeared.

So my question is: is there any way to recover the uncomitted code?

P.s., I'm planning to add "source code doesn't exist unless its in subversion" and "backup daily" to our rules to prevent this from happening again.

Answer 1

You won't find the answer in SVN, but you can use something like this undelete tool.

A file isn't really gone until the drive is formatted (long).

Answer 2

If the files were never committed and they're no longer on the hard drive, then I'm afraid they're probably gone, unless your user has manual backups, or some other recovery/undeletion strategy works out.