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We lost a .dmg file on an harddrive. Our tech guy was able to recover files from the drive but not one of them is a .dmg file. But they are a lot of .apple file. Can the .dmg file we are looking for be one of them?

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If you can edit in some details like the company that did the recovery or the software they used to perform the recovery (including what OS it ran on) we might be able to guess better. Also, you can make a copy of the files in question and simply rename them to .dmg and see if they open with Disk Utility. Other than taking time, you won't damage things if Disk Utility actually doesn't like the format of the newly renamed file. – bmike♦ Nov 6 '12 at 16:29
I'm trying to get the infos about software they used to do the recovery, as soon as i get it, i ll post it. I tried to rename the .apple files as .dmg but disk utility won't open it. I succed to dod something with the .apple, opening it with stuffit expander but the result wasn't be a .dmg and it weight O Ko... any idea? thanks! – Mathilde Nov 6 '12 at 16:40
Awesome - I'll delete this comment and your previous one in a bit. We can keep the chatter low and the information high. The system will show that you edited the question after I made my comment so everyone will know you've come back with more details or have edited in that you were unable to get further details. Welcome and good luck with your data recovery. – bmike♦ Nov 6 '12 at 16:42
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You have your answer if by renaming the file it doesn't open. If it were the undamaged .dmg - it would open once you replaced the .apple with the .dmg so either it's not the file or the recovery was not successful in recreating the file in the correct format for disk utility/finder to open it again. – bmike♦ Nov 6 '12 at 16:44

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The .apple files are probably either AppleSingle or MacBinary files. The Apple file system keeps more information about a file than other filesystems (Window, Unix, etc.) do, so AppleSingle and MacBinary formats were created to package up all that information in a way that could be transported on any file system.

So if you're looking for MyDisk.dmg but instead find MyDisk.apple, that's probably the encoded version of the file you want and you need to decode it. Try downloading the free StuffIt Expander and see if it can convert the files for you.

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