Undelete / Recovery Tools / Lost Files

agent26 · #1 March 12th, 2007, 07:15 PM

Hello to the world of people much better with computers than I am ...

A wild tragedy occurred out of nowhere today. A folder on our desktop just magically dissappeared. We did not empty the trash, we did nothing, now it's gone. At first, the amount of free space on the partition did not change; then it did after restart.

I've researched and everything seems very costly. I'm also not sure if this is a problem I can throw at Mac (it's not under warantee anyway) cause we didn't delete the file or empty the trash. The computer just ate our folder!

If anyone has any free or supercheap recovery tips, I'd be oh-so-grateful (and so would my fiance; we lost files for our wedding planning that she didn't back up). It's a powerbook running OSX.

Thanks so much,

Dan

Satcomer · #2 March 12th, 2007, 08:35 PM

Lets see if the file is still there. First lets go to your Desktop file. Just open Your Hard drive and click on "Desktop" in the left hard column. See if the file is there. If it is not then stop what you are doing because your actions may overwrite the information you lost on your hard drive. so if you can find the data, download FileSalvage to see if that can get the data. Then get a backup program so something like this will not happen in the future and you loose data again.

Now when is the last time you ran some routine maintenance on your Mac? Just launch /Applications/Utilities /Disk Utility and "Repair Permissions" on your startup drive. Also consider getting a disk maintenance program like Yasu or Onyx and the most important long term disk health program DiskWarrior.