Recovering deleted files?

Cianos

Hey,
A friend of mine had important files deleted from a mac she uses. Is there any way she can recover the lost files?

Thanks

Sad Professor

Try Filesalvage:

http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1

nialler

I've recovered one of the users of this forum's HD using stellar-phoenix but filesalvage is also an excellent utility.

If it's an office file (ie microsoft office) filesalvage have a limited version called officesalvage that works on office files, pdf, .sit file etc. I would highly recommend it.

muggyog

First tell your friend not to use the Mac until they recover the data. Disk activity may overwrite the files. It is said that Mac file recovery is not easy due to the UNIX file structure however I have rescued Mac files with various degrees of success. Recently I used Photorec , an open source file rescue application to recover stuff from a USB stick. There is another application on this website which I plan on using on an external drive which has lost all data. I am also going to use Data Rescue (Prosoft) which I have used successfully before. As with all recovery applications, if you know the name or type of the file you need you will save a lot of time and effort searching through all files on the Mac.

Obviously good idea to do the recovery using another Mac connected in firewire mode (her mac appears as another drive on the desktop)

muggyog

UPDATE

I forgot to mention the USB stick was formatted FAT32 so the open source suggestion wont work for you ( you need something that will read the HFS file structure ). Im having fun with my SATA drive but I will get the better of it. Keep you posted!

ZENER

You're bound to find something here.

ZEN

muggyog

OK I lied, you CAN use PhotoRec to recover HFS partitioned data.

My current interest in file recovery is brought about by becoming the temporary (until I fix it!) of a sick 1T firewire drive enclosure. Actually the enclosure holds two 500G SATA drives and a bridge board. I was unable to mount this enclosure on the Mac desktop so I removed one drive and stuck it in an (Intel) Mac Pro running 10.4.11. Still not mounting but does appear as unformatted in the Disk Utility. Ah yes the greatest Mac disk repair utility, Diskwarrior, will sort that. NO, not a sausage! Back to http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download. Downloaded both utilities ( not beta ) and ran PhotoRec. YES, application is now scavaging ( and finding ) files. A lot are damaged, (MPGs and MP3s) but .DOCs, JPGs, PDFs and .TXT seem OK. I will leave overnight and use TestDisk in the morning to try and repair he partition.

This is all very interesting but what has that to do with the problem at hand?

First it proves that PhotoRec CAN rescue the deleted files and if they are text based recover them undamaged.

How you do that is the problem. Dont know if booting in target mode to another Mac will work, try it anyway. You could take out the drive and put it as a second drive in another Mac but you would need technical expertise and adapters for the drive. Third (and riskiest) option would be to install PhotoRec on an external drive, run it and direct rescued files to that drive. Check the options in PhotoRec, you will be given the choice of where to save recovered data. You can also select what filetypes to recover (under File Opt). This will reduce the need to go through thousands of files which you dont need because rescued files will not have correct name (you only get that in the paid for rescue applications!).

Bet you cant wait to hear the next thrilling installment!

Eric Cartman

DataRecueII (II might be 2) recovers everything, and theres a free trial