Unbelievably Boneheaded Stupid thing

[Boyd 9]

So, in my regular back up of my hard drive (unfortunately, due to these economic times, I only have one..... my bad) I switched around the order of what gets copied to what.

Instead of copying my working Hard drive to a backup, I stupidly copied the backup to the master, and now have lost about a weeks worth of work.

I know this was unbelievably stupid on my part. Stupid stupid stupid. Any way to recover the files?

I'm running 10.4.11, PowerMac G4.......

Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ricks]

You might check out a couple apps made for this. One of the mods tangled with accidentally reformatting a data drive with OS9. No one app seemed to get everything but he had good success getting complete recoveries using 2 different ones:

http://www.r-tt.com/data_recovery_macintosh/

and

www.r-studio.com//

Not sure which of them allow you to test it before purchase. But worth it to look them both over.

[unclemac]

The big thing here is to stop working on the machine, as every time you (or the OS) saves anything, it can be overwriting your deleted files.....which are still there, just marked as deleted and made invisible.

Software such as Rick linked to lets you see the "deleted" files and restore them, as long as nothing else has been saved on the exact same space on the drive.

Optimally, you can boot from another drive and let the software see the whole drive in question.

[Hazkell]

Guess you know this but .... do a "Target Disk Mode" from your G4 to one of your laptops, if you have the space.

I usta use "data-recovery" with 0S 9 quite a number of times.
That always worked!
Don't know if 10.4.11 will open a 9.x folder or file.

Good luck, h

[Boyd 9]

So, I'm trying not to freak out....... or, as it says on the cover of the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, "Don't Panic!"

Fortunately, I have the boot and the users volumes separated.

I have found out that I need to recovery basically anything that was modified or created after March 4th - so, I've lost about 11 days worth so far.

I've downloaded the R-studio demo, and it's unbelievably confusing. I'm not sure what to do. Maybe just breathe and come back to it.

I produce a weekly radio show (music-oriented in nature), and I do ALL my planning in iTunes. So far, I've lost a two-hour master to a recently completed show (hours of work, although I still have the hard-copy paper print out of the script), but I've also lost playlists and possibly also a few CDs worth of material that I imported into iTunes.

Other than download demo software, haven't done anything..... and I installed the demo software on the (unaffected) boot drive.

Sigh...... I don't think I've EVER done anything this boneheaded.

Anyway..... can anyone with experience in R-studio tell me how to easily recover all files modified after a specific date? Once I do that, I can just take my time choosing what to restore........ I guess........

[Boyd 9]

Taking a breath and trying to read the instructions..... that will prob work a little better

[eric]

You might check out a couple apps made for this. One of the mods tangled with accidentally reformatting a data drive with OS9.

A mod did that? Who managed that major fail?!? Guilty as charged here.

Ok, Boyd 9, as you already said, take deep breath and relax. First, here are some other apps you might look at:

Disk Drill: http://www.cleverfiles.com/
- This one's also in the App Store.

Data Rescue: http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

I used those and R-Studio on a 1.5 TB HD is accidentally reformatted in OS 9.

Both R-Studio and Disk Drill found the original file/folder trees/hierarchies as they were before I wiped the HD with 2 partitions, and managed to recover them. R-Studio was faster in finding both partitions at launch; Disk Drill found one quickly but needed 6 hours to scan to find other.

R-Studio's interface is mega-geeky, but I think when push comes to shove it gives you what you want -- particularly with dates (creation, modification, and maybe even last opened). You can set up filters on the files it sees. So you could then filter by mod/created date to find the files you lost; that may really come in handy in your case. Disk Drill showed some date information, but I can't remember which and I don't recall much about filtering. I didn't have a lot of need for filters since I recovered everything. But I know it's there in R-Studio for visualizing and also when you recover -- you can choose to use the filter when restoring or ignore it.

Data Rescue also shows date information for what it finds. But it was much harder to work with because it didn't show me the original file/folder trees, and a backup of OS X pretty much got exploded everywhere. And it took like 10 hours to deep scan the HD to find all that

This may matter to you. Disk Drill did *not* recover the files with their original date/times (created and modified); the recovered files get the recovery date and time. R-Studio gave me the original date/times as did Data Rescue on the recovered files.

R-Studio has some problems with metadata. Some files still worked although there were errors on the metadata during the recovery, e.g. images lost their "previews" in icon view but still open and worked fine. Some files were trashworthy (fonts), but I had backups/zips of those because I know from experience how easily those can get messed up.

[Boyd 9]

Thanks for the very useful info Eric. Right now I am trying the demo of R-Studio, and if I can just get most of what i lost back, I will be happy.

Like I said, since I know what the cut off date was, hopefully I can just recover everything beyond that date and sort through it all later -- or at least I hope that that will be the case.

I feel so stupid for having done this, but I guess as they say, accidents do happen..... and hopefully it will just involve a little time and a little money and maybe if I'm lucky not too much else.....

[yeungfeng]

Welcome to the stupid club

I've been a member for almost 20 Years. I remember the first time I click yes to erase this disk, only to pause and reflect about 5 minutes later and go "Oh Shut" I just erase my drive with all my stuff on it.

At this point I think we could use a goo 12 step program on this.

Whom else is a member of this club.

AND

I am so sorry for your misfortune! It's never easy. I have had so much experience with this sort of thing, that I now have two drives that I alternate backing up to, plus a partition with TimeMachine for daily document changes. So far as I can tell everyone here is giving you the right advice. First stay calm, it is not the end of the world. Remember it could always be worse. Turn it into a good thing by making sure you don't join the club again. Cheap thing would be getting a small USB drive and save important documents to it.

I think Unclemac is spot on, don't use the drive until you can get info off of it. Boot from your external backup.

Good Luck!

[MacLoon]

There are loads of ways of getting at the deleted files, but it's going to be difficult if you have overwritten most of the disk. What you are looking at is a disk copied on top of another disk, not just a load of deleted files. That is going to be your biggest hurdle.
I use several suites of software, but the best one that I use regularly is File Salvage. I also have Data Rescue but I stopped using that in favour of FS about 4 years ago.
Drive Genius and Techtool Pro also have recovery functions. Techtool works well if you already have it installed, but whether that would have any great effect on anything other than the boot drive I'm not sure.
I think that you're going to struggle though. Unless you've got loads of space on the drive. If it's tight then you're going to be relying on luck as you'll need to be finding your files in the free space.

[Boyd 9]

Can anybody on the forum tell me where iTunes keeps its information on playlists?

I know it probably sounds stupid, but producing a weekly radio show, I spend hours and hours organizing each show using the playlist feature in iTunes. I organize the songs, reorganize, try different orders, substitute songs..... it goes on and on.

Most of the things I "lost" in the 11 day regression were on the desktop, or I think they can be easily found.

The other stuff lost was music I'd imported into iTunes from my own library (that can be replaced, and didn't amount to much), and the playlists in iTunes.... that last part actually represents some time and effort, and I'd LOVE to get those back.

Anyway, R-studio is humming away. It will apparently take about 40 hours to do a scan of a 1 TB HD. Keeping my fingers crossed........

Again, thanks to everyone for helpful suggestions, and helping to keep me from panicking.

[MacLoon]

Anyway, R-studio is humming away. It will apparently take about 40 hours to do a scan of a 1 TB HD. Keeping my fingers crossed........

Good luck with the 40 hours! The last time I did that on a 1TB drive it took nearly 3 days. The longest, however, was almost 6 days on a physically malfunctioning drive... but I got there in the end

[eric]

Can anybody on the forum tell me where iTunes keeps its information on playlists?

While it might be painful, you might want to grab the entire iTunes folder to be safe:

/Users/[username]/Music/iTunes

I'm pretty sure playlists are stored inside in this file: iTunes Music Library.xml
- or the full path: /Users/[username]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml

That's just an xml file that you can open in a text editor. So I played around editing an playlist, and I was seeing the changes in that file. That should be the one, but hey you might want to grab the whole iTunes folder to be safe -- or at least cut down on the music files that you don't need.

Whoa 40 hours for the scan?!? And I was complaining about 10 hours for some of them. But I guess that was my "advantage" of working with a wiped HD. I've been working on the HD for over a week now. I got the files recovered, and I re-wiped and zero'ed out the HD. But getting them back is taking some time as I'm testing the recovered files.

[MacLoon]

Whoa 40 hours for the scan?!? And I was complaining about 10 hours for some of them. But I guess that was my "advantage" of working with a wiped HD.

I suppose my three days did include getting all the files back and rebuilding file names as well.
The hardest part is having a customer wanting to know why it takes so long instead of just being grateful it can be done at all!

[eric]

I suppose my three days did include getting all the files back and rebuilding file names as well.
The hardest part is having a customer wanting to know why it takes so long instead of just being grateful it can be done at all!

I see. I think my wiping it in OS 9 was a blessing of sorts, the original files names were all there. That would have been a complete nightmare had I lost the original file names since it would have broken so many Quark and Indesign projects.

[MacLoon]

Yep. Agreed on the Quark and ID situation.
The real b!tch with data recovery is if it has to scavenge the drive for the files because 9/10 times it won't come back with anything other than generic file names... you ever tried sorting out 70,000+ jpgs?!
One of my favourites for pulling files off dying drives is Disk Warrior. If it can see the drive - doesn't matter whether it mounts or not - and create a preview image, the files can be copied from there. At least that's one way that you can cherry pick files... doesn't help too much with deleted files, however.

[Boyd 9]

So, rather than seeing "free space" (which I thought that R-Studio would do), it's apparently seeing the "unused sectors" as "unrecognized" (I'm assuming that's because before I ever used this hard drive, that I wiped it with a pass of zeroes prior to it's first use?).

So, since I know approximately how far back I need to go to look for deleted files, will I be able to easily tell R-Studio to only give me a list of files modified after that date?

I'm also just thinking of making a mass copy to another Hard Drive and then cherry pick through it later, just so I can get back to work...... it's hard enough having done something you're still chastising yourself over, but equally hard to sit here and wait for it to be done to see what the results are, wishing that you could get back to work already -- but can't -- for fear that "getting back to work" might inadvertently mean writing over a file that needs to be recovered.

Aye yi yi!!!!! What a mess -- fortunately, not the end of the world.........

[Boyd 9]

So........

I don't know what to do now...... After having R-Studio scan the HD for over 28 hours, with less than 5 hours to go, I got some kind of weird "error message," reported from the Seritek 1V4 SATA card I have installed, about how "some function had timed out and couldn't be completed within 31 seconds."

I waited patiently for the spinning beach ball to go away, but it wouldn't. I called up the Force Quit app, and then the Finder froze on me, with spinning beach ball. Mouse still operative, but unresponsive.

So....... I have to start the whole entire R-studio scan again? I had less than a 100 GB to go.... talk about supreme frustration.

I am contemplating buying a new HD to replace the Users volume, clone the Users volume (i.e., the one needing recovery operations) and setting it aside so I can get back to work on the new Hard Drive and do the recovery later...... I just don't know if I have another 28 hours in me to find out if the scan will be successful or not.......

And of course, I had to do a hard restart..... afraid to run Applejack, because I don't want to rewrite over anything.....

What to do, what to do????????? Suggestions?????????

[MacLoon]

I think that cloning off the the drive would be a very good idea so you're not bound by the problem.
I had a look at R-studio and there's a limit on the file sizes it can recover in Demo mode so it may have been pushing you down the route of paying $79.95 as well... and then for it not to work properly.
Presumably the drive you are needing to recover is attached to the Seritek? Can you take the drive off that and put it into a USB box? Or, better, a firewire one and, once you've cloned it, recover from there so you can isolate the Seritek card?
Have you tried Disk Drill? That's free if you don't want to spend the money.
Once you've cloned the disk, at least you are free for it to take as long as necessary to recover the files.

[eric]

boyd 9, might consider shooting a support request (whatever they call it) to R-Studio just to see if maybe they can give you hand.

Agree with the plan to clone off the HD, so Boyd9 can get work done. I was fortunate mine was an external, and I hooked it up to my Mini and let it do the long scanning and recovery, which freed up my MBP for work. Actually the Mini was faster anyway, at least the estimates of times.

Yeah R-Studio like some other app have restrictions on their demos. They let you see what they can find, let you recover a bit (or none) and then you need to cough over the cash to make a big/full restore. Data Rescue is the same.

So is Disk Drill depending on the nature of the recovery. My recovery couldn't be done with Disk Drill's free version; I needed to use their Partition recover feature which you have to pay for. It required a paid version -- be it from them or the App Store. I mentioned this earlier, but just tossing it out again: Disk Drill lets you see some dates in the table of files it finds, but it doesn't restore files with the original dates and times. Sometimes that matters, sometimes isn't doesn't.

I tried and used all of the above in the following order:
1. Data Rescue 3 - I already had a licensed copy that was in some bundle I bought for something else. I've used earlier versions, incl. those from OS 9
2. Disk Drill
3. R-Studio
I ended up buying Disk Drill when it saw my partitions as they were (unlike Data Rescue 3); then I found out after the recovery I didn't get original dates and times, which are for me often big deals. But for my partitions with app installers, it was fine; and I've kept that recovery.
I then checked out R-Studio, demo'ed some files that came through with original dates/times, so I dropped more $ for that one too. This has been the base recovery that I've been testing and verifying. R-Studio had some problems with some files that Disk Drill and Data Rescue 3 didn't -- so I've been cherry-picking those in the "final" recovered/restored HD.

I wrote support at Disk Drill about the date/time issues; they told me the reproduced it and they'd let me know. So that's probably they'll have to put in the app later.
R-Studio's support has been really good; I've gotten fast responses from them. I'm still working me with them on the issues with metadata that they're program had with certain files (while Data Rescue and Disk Drill didn't). They've kicked it up to Development and I've gotta send them some samples.

I think that cloning off the the drive would be a very good idea so you're not bound by the problem.
I had a look at R-studio and there's a limit on the file sizes it can recover in Demo mode so it may have been pushing you down the route of paying $79.95 as well... and then for it not to work properly.
Presumably the drive you are needing to recover is attached to the Seritek? Can you take the drive off that and put it into a USB box? Or, better, a firewire one and, once you've cloned it, recover from there so you can isolate the Seritek card?
Have you tried Disk Drill? That's free if you don't want to spend the money.
Once you've cloned the disk, at least you are free for it to take as long as necessary to recover the files.