Searching for a related issue I ran across your post.
I have recovered deleted or corrupted parts by digging around in the user's Pro/E - Windchill workspace cache on the workstation and also in the Windchill "defaultcachevault". It's painful because the filenames are numeric so you have to open each one until you find the right one.
Best case - If the user is storing his cad in a windchill workspace there will be a cached copy of that workspace on the workstation under the users home directory, can't remember the path off the top of my head.
You can open part files in notepad more quickly than in Pro/E just to look for the part name.
Worst case - Look in the Windchill defaultcachevault directory. If the user is checking his parts in, there will be a copy in the "defaultcachevault" until the "purgeunreferenced" job cleans it out, if it ever does. If you aren't the windchill admin, ask your windchill admin to let you look around in there. This is much more work because every file checked into windchill gets copied into the defaultcachevault before being uploaded to the final vault so there are a lot of other files in there.
What I wish for is a configuration option in Windchill to "move deleted files to holding area" that I could then clean out based on file age whenever I wanted.
