recover my files- similar one for mac

G

glamrockchick

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tried downloading data rescue 3 and it said: choose a workspace , says workplace must be on a separate physical drive selected for scanning and can't select my hard drive, need to select another thing besides the thing i want scanning , anyone know what i can do? or any programs that are easier to use with recovering files from the hard drive? cos i upgraded my mac to lion and lost some things

hope u can help

thanks
 
Do what you were told. Get an external drive and use it to recover your files. You can't recover files to the source drive because you run the distinct possibility of writing over the files that you are trying to recover.
 
glamrockchick said:
so if i buy an external hard drive i will be able to get back my old files and put them on there?
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There are no guarantees. I am not familiar with Data Resue. However, I have used other file recovery utilities. Data Rescue's instructions are generic to file recovery software. If you want to recovery your files, then do as you were told. If you don't, then ignore it.
 
ahh so would there be any point in getting a hard drive and is there a big chance i would recover my files? I've used recover my files on windows before
 
When you delete a file, what happens is that the OS just frees the place on the Hard Disk - the data isn't overwritten unless you use "secure erase", but all meta-information is lost - eg the filename and the folder it was associated with. Now, unless you have written new data onto the HD and the new data has used the space from a file you've 'deleted', you'll be able to recover the file.

The file recover program works by scanning every sector of your HD and tries to recreate files from the data still present on the sectors.

Think of your HD as a book with contents, chapters and sub-chapters. When you get it, all the pages are blank. When you create a folder on the HD you are initiating a new chapter; when you store a file you write a sub-chapter. When you erase a file, you just erase the entry in the content section of the book, but the text on the pages is still there. Now, when you write a new sub-chapter, you seek for the first free page - if the page has text on it, you erase it and write new text on it, then you repeat for as many pages as necessary. Now, you have to be aware of two things: the pages don't have to be conseccutive and only as many pages as are needed are written to So let's say you have 2 chapters with 5 pages each, and then erase them. If you subsequently write a new sub-chapter 3 pages long, you might be able to recover 2 pages from one file and the whole of the other file; if you write a new sub-chapter 7 pages long, you might be able to recover 3 pages of one file. (Actually, it's more complicated than this, but for simply understanding the basic principles this will be sufficient.)

Now, in order to do their magic file recovery programs can't write to the HD being searched as there's a danger of overwriting data that can belong to file that has to be recovered. Thus the need for an external HD.

When the recovery process is over, you'll just have a lot of generic files - the recovery program is able to find out which type of file they are but neither their names nor where they were stored.

So: get that external HD as the program says and as you have been advised to here -OR- consider your files lost forever !
 
thanks, will look into getting one, cheapest for £50, want one for less if i can.. i upgraded from a old mac version to lion and lost some files that i didn't back up onto my usb
 
glamrockchick said:
ahh so would there be any point in getting a hard drive and is there a big chance i would recover my files? I've used recover my files on windows before
Click to expand...

As others have said, there is absolutely no way that anyone can place a "chances of recovery" number on you recovering your files. There are way too many factors that go into whether or not a file can be recovered, and many of those factors are out of human control completely.

If someone tells you there's a big chance you'll be able to recover them, they're lying, because they cannot possibly know.

If someone tells you there's a tiny chance you'll be able to recover them, they're lying, because they cannot possibly know.

If someone tells you that they don't know what kind of success you'll see when you try and recover your files, they're telling the truth, because that's the only truth anyone can say about data recovery.

The only way to see if you can recover your files is to actually try and recover your files. That's the catch with data recovery: you must pay (in the form of recovery software and/or additional storage) in order to even see what the likelihood of successful recovery will be.

Good luck!
 
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