What data recovery software do you use on your Mac?

I inadvertently deleted some file on my Mac.... Actually I deleted A LOT OF FILES. Most of them I can live without but I'd like to try and get back as many as I can.

jemagirl (imported) wrote: Fri Dec 19, 2008 10:42 pm What data recovery software do you use on your Mac?

I inadvertently deleted some file on my Mac.... Actually I deleted A LOT OF FILES. Most of them I can live without but I'd like to try and get back as many as I can.

Do you have "Leopard" (ie: Mac OS X 10.5) on your Mac? If so take a look at "Time Machine". Its not really Data-Recovery per se, but it is a REALTIME backup of the computer. You can "take the computer back in time" to a date before you deleted those files and copy them to CD or USB Flash.

If you don't have 10.5:

First off a very important question: When you emptied the files from the Trash, did you use the regular "Empty Trash" or the "Secure Empty Trash"? (if you didn't Empty the Trash yet then the files aren't deleted -- they are all still there in the Trashcan on your Desktop).

* If you used "Secure" there is NO WAY to recover them, the files have been over-written with 0's and are forever gone.

* If you used a regular "Empty Trash" then a Data Recovery program should be able to get the files back (unless they have already been over-written by files you have saved since you deleted them).

I only know of a few Data Recovery programs for Mac. Unfortunately none of them are free/open-source:

Boomerang Home Edition: $40

Undelete and File-Salvage (ie: gets data out of "damaged" files) utility.

http://www.boomdrs.com/macosx/

FileSalvage: $90

Undelete and Unformat program for MacOS X. Works on both HFS (Mac) and FAT/FAT32 (PC-Formatted) disks.

http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/inde ... ducts_id=1

Prosoft Data Rescue II: $100

Data Recovery program for MacOS X (includes undelete/unformat functions)

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/produ ... rescue.php

TechTools Pro: $99

This is sort of like what Norton Utilities used to be way back when before it sucked... Its a powerful Disk Utility Suite for Mac OS X. Defrag, Sector Check, Undelete, Unformat, ect...

http://www.micromat.com/index.php?optio ... view&id=31

I haven't used any of these before, so I can't recommend one over any of the others. Hope you can get your hands on one of these, and it will be able to get your files back. Good luck!

Hi Prudence,

I had forgotten that I posted this and solved the problem with minimal data loss. First I bought a 1 TB external hard drive so I don't have to worry as much about space. Also I can vouch for Data Resque II. It does recover most of the files. At least as far as image files go. I suspect video files are much more difficult to recover because they are so easily corrupted.

I upgraded to Leopard but I am not entirely happy. For one thing my beloved Photoshop 7 does not run. I am overdue for an upgrade but Adobe's current release is CS4 which won't run on my G5 So I had to reinstall Tiger on the second hard drive. There are a couple of other annoying issues with Leopard such as not always being allowed to see things in column view

Leopard does have a lot of plusses though. I like being able to see all movies or all pictures since I now have so many different places to hide them