Urgent Lost Files on Macbook :(

Hiya guys,

Bit of a long story, so I'll try and keep this short. My best friend and I have our final exams in 10 days time, and as such revision is in full swing. She's been working flat out for the last couple of weeks on getting some notes together, and they're great. She went to back them up tonight, and the folder's disappeared along with all of it's contents. NOT good timing.

I'm pretty tech-savvy, and were this windows I reckon I'd have no issues recovering lost files; I've no idea where to start on mac though really, and I could do with some help urgently before she has a total breakdown lol!

The files are all open office documents, and so obviously the first logical step was to try the auto-recovery. Nothing productive there, just some old files that were never intended to be saved. Checked the recent documents menu, and whilst the files are all still listed there, clicking them comes up with a 'The file could not be located, would you like to locate it yourself?' message. The trash isn't empty, and has some files in it that have been there for over a week, but no sign of this missing folder. I've also tried using the search function for all of the file names within the folders incase it'd been moved some how, and once again, no avail.

If you think I'd have missed anything (assume I'm a TOTAL mac n00b) with the above, please point it out. Beyond that point, I'm praying there's some kind of way to recover these files with some kind of disk utility or something, but really have no idea where to start.

I'd be eternally grateful for ANY help you can give!

Thanks,

Regards,
Phazaar

 

The other step is to click the little magnifying glass at the top and type in ".doc" or ".docx" and see what Spotlight comes up with (don't include the " in there).

Another step is, if she's using OS X 10.5, has she used Time Machine to back up her data? Sorry to ask obvious questions, but...

More info!

 

If the files have been deleted from trash they may not be gone completely. Assuming OSX operates like Windows the space on the disk is simply marked as free and not scrubbed of the data. Unless the position of the data has been re-written to it should still be there. Try this, its only on trial but should show you if the files are still on the disk. If they are then you can buy a license. Just don't go writing data to you disk before running the program, you may overwrite your lost notes.

http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=74

Good luck with the recovery and the finals. If it does work sign-up for a free 2gb online storage for your files to be secure. I'm using it and it seems good.

http://mozy.com/free

 

If there's files in the trash that have been there for a week, there's no way the files have been deleted normally, as they would have to go to the trash first.

My first guess is that somehow the files have been renamed and moved. First thing to check for is if they've just been hidden. We can do this in terminal.

In terminal, type cd and then the directory where the files where located(ie: /Users/yourname/Desktop/folder/). You can also drag the folder into the terminal window instead of typing it out.
Once we're located where the files should be, type ls -a. This should list all the files in the folder including hidden files. If you see the files there and they have a period in front(like this: .filename.txt), then you just need to rename those files: mv .filename.txt filename.txt.

If that doesn't work, try DataRescueII. Try to do as little as possible on the machine otherwise you may overwrite the deleted files.

If you have another mac around, turn the macbook in question off and try to get to the files in Target Disk Mode

Good luck.

 

I do not know how your friend backed up her file, if your friends use time machine, then life would be very easy.
I would like you to describe how your friend back up her files and what version of OSX does she use.
Let's start from there.

 

mister fan's question might be the right one. is the backup app perhaps a misconfigured sync program?

there is a long-fixed leopard bug with moving files. any chance she's on 10.5.0? (not updated since November)

 

Right, more details it is then. She's on 10.4 (Tiger?), and as such there's no Timemachine, and nothing has been auto-backing up. I should have made it clearer, when she found the files were missing, she was going to back up onto a memory stick. The only copies of the files were on the mac itself in Documents.

I should be heading over tonight/tomorrow morning to give those suggestions a try, and I'll bring my macbook along and try the target disk mode thing as well. Any other suggestions just so I have a list of things to go through when I get there?

Thanks a lot guys