back to 1969 and lost files!

S

sevendollars

Registered
Hi,

I am not really that familier with Macs. My girlfriend uses a Mac for work, word mostly and has lost a weeks worth of files and I just can't see how! Bacially she has been getting a 'startup disk is getting full' error for the last week. Everything has been ok, there was 2gigs free, she has been saving and opening files to the HD. She never really shuts it down, I think just sending it to sleep. So, it was left unplugged for a while and the battery died. When she boots it up she got the error, 'your clock has been set back to a date before 2001..'. The time is now set to 31st December 1969? Now her last weeks worth of files have gone, also emails that have been deleted are gone also the desktop files are from a week ago. To me this is really weird because if a file is saved its saved right?, the file existis on HD? I can understand thing like desktop files being reverted but not actual files. Its like it never actually saved anything to the HD and all was lost when the battery died. I really cannot understand this, I've been using computers for years and never seen anything like this?

Any advice would be fantastic. I really think the files are there somewhere, I just have no idea how to access them. I have done a few searches for the 31st December issue and it seems to be a internal clock battery thing, but this still doesn't explain the lost files.

Thanks in advance, I really have no idea!

Cheers

Ben
 
Seeing as you did actually save them to disk, the files are most likely actually there. The system keeps a catalog with the positions of all the files on the disk, and if this gets corrupted you can 'lose' some. I don't know of anything free that can do this kind of recovery, and there seems to be a consensus that some of the disk utilities can make things worse. An exception is Disk Warrior:
http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/
It's expensive ($79.95) and some people insist there is no need for any disk maintenance software for OS X but it has rescued files for me before and if you can afford it, is a worthwhile investment.

I know there are other file recovery tools out there, but haven't tried any because I had to buy Disk Warrior after a bad crash. Hopefully someone else has here. If disk warrior is too expensive, have a look at
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1
File Salvage, which is cheaper and will let you do a free trial.

One thing, in OS X generally, 2 GB of free space is not really enough. The system uses 'swap files' to save from RAM onto disk to use like virtual RAM, and can use more than that. All sorts of trouble can result from not having enough space. Either get a bigger disk or archive some stuff to DVDs or CDs. Try to keep at least 10% free, the more the better. Disk Inventory (free)
http://www.derlien.com/
can help identify what is taking up a lot of space. You might find duplicates of things, or things you don't want any more. Do as little as possible though, before running some kind of file recovery, because if those files are not in the catalog they can be overwritten, and with so little free space, that's quite likely. Your system will regard them as free space.

It sounds like you don't have a mac yourself, but to do file recovery you'll need to have a different disk to do the file recovery, both to run the software from and to recover to, otherwise you might overwrite some of the stuff you're trying to recover. Is there another computer at work she could use to burn a startup disk, or a backup disk she could plug in to it? At least Disk Warrior comes as a bootable disk, but you'd have to wait for that to be posted.

Ideally you should use a separate hard disk, but failing that use a different mac to make a bootable CD with the recovery software (e.g. File Salvage or a downloaded Disk Warrior) on it, then boot from that, but first free up some space on it. A program called BootCD
http://www.charlessoft.com/
can help you do that. If this is not possible, try any local mac suppliers for Disk Warrior disk without waiting for the post.

Under the circumstances (very little free space, no backups) you have a difficult task so make sure she knows this before you start, or she might end up blaming you!

You're right, the clock battery should not be causing this. I have an old 7200 that has run fine for years with a flat battery (not recommending this!).
 
If the computer _warns_ you about the drive getting full, you better believe that there's a problem. Things will turn slow, the computer will have a hard time managing memory (because there's no more space for virtual memory files) etc. 2 GB sound like a lot of free space to you? It's definitely not. I guess it was these circumstances that ticked that computer off.

The time thing... Is it an iBook? They don't have backup batteries for the clock. Other Apple notebooks have the same or similar problems when power's gone completely for a longer period of time (like a week).
 
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I've been curious about this one for a while with OS X and it's sort of related since we're talking about virtual memory.

Is there a way for OS X to actually use a separate partition for swap space (aka, virtual memory)? I think if this were possible, then there wouldn't be any worries about space on the main partition. I'm used to this in Linux, but I've just blindly accepted the fact that Mac OS X will store the swap space on the main drive. However, if this is a problem once approaching something like 2 GB (which honeslty is a significant amount of hard drive space to lose), I at least would think this would be an option. Unfortunately, I've never seen the option to be able to do this in any installation of OS X.

Just a thought. :)
 
Yeah, but he seems to update other parts of his site when they need it, reckon it's low-risk, worth a try so long as you have backup somewhere. From what he says there it looks like the worst that will happen is that the system will miss the instruction and use the main partition.
 
Thanks so much for the replies. Someone actually recommended a program called disk first aid, something like that anway. We tried that and recovered lots of old files, but nothing before the date the system reset to. Its seems like the recent files are lost forever.

I cannot belive even if the mac was running out of disk space that it would do this, seems crazy to me. I expect its like Master Boot Record on the PC and somehow it went back to previous version. Oh well, I mean you shouldn't really be in this situation if you do regular backups. I can't say its renewed my faith in macs, but I suppose its a rare occurance.

Once again, thanks for the help!

Ben
 
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