keychain restore

brazen

Registered
is there any way to restore a deleted keychain? i deleted the entire contents of my keychain folder........
 
You can always use Data Rescue II or some similar data-recovery software, or you can send your drive off to DriveSavers or some similar professional data recovery service. Neither are free -- Data Rescue II runs under $100, and DriveSavers runs anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

The short and skinny is that there's no guarantee that you can recover the keychain. Deleted files' data stays on the hard drive until it's overwritten by new data, and new data is constantly being written to the hard drive (in the form of journaling information, new files, behind-the-scenes optimization, etc.). If you want the best chances of recovering the keychain, stop using the computer immediately and turn it off... that's the only way to maximize the recoverability of the file. Invest in data recovery software or research data recovery companies.

Like Satcomer said, the easiest solution is to simply restore the deleted keychain from the backups of your data that you keep regularly. I hate to sound preachy, but not keeping backups of your data is like putting your important, private papers on the front porch and hoping they don't blow away overnight.

I would recommend investing in a backup solution immediately, before you next touch a keyboard, if you don't already have one. With Leopard, it's as simple as purchasing any old cheap-o external USB or FireWire hard drive and plugging it in. The rest is completely automatic and automated.
 
so mac doesnt have any 'restore to a previous date' feature then? im new at this, please forgive my seeming a bit stupid......
 
Are you using Leopard, brazen? And enough of that " ... forgive my seeming a bit stupid" nonsense :)

Welcome aboard, BTW ;)


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Same here. With Leopard, there's Time Machine. If it's set up properly then you could have restored your KeyChains. Unfortunately, with Tiger it's pretty much like what's been said already. You stop using your Mac, and pay the bucks to have the data recovered.

If it's too late for that, as you've continued using your Mac, then there's always the future ... and hindsight. What I mean is you never ever allow this to happen again.

The choices as I know them are you go out and pick up an Ext HD, then look at these:


I personally use SuperDuper but I'm sure the others are just as good and personal opinions vary.

With SuperDuper, you can use it without any cost, but if you buy the full program you can cut the backup time substantially. I can't speak for CCC as I've never used it and AFAIK, rsync is totally free.

Alternatively you can use DVD's to back up your data.

The type of Backup I choose isn't an archival one ... what happens is about once per month, I hook up my external drive and run SuperDuper, which examines the contents of my internal drive against the contents of my ext drive. If SuperDuper finds a file which isn't on my Ext drive, then it copies it over and if it finds that a certain file that is on the Ext drive is no longer on my internal drive, then it deletes it from the ext drive.

So what I end up with is a mirror of my System which is actually a bootable drive in case my internal drive becomes corrupt in any way and can't be recovered. In this scenario, I would simply boot from my external drive and ... to be perfectly honest I would need to consult the manual as so far I've had no troubles.

I believe I could restore my mirrored system from the ext drive back onto the internal drive and continue on.

Hope this helps :)
 
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