Hot answers tagged data-recovery
9
From the Apple Support pages Securely erasing a disk
To securely erase a disk or partition:
In Disk Utility, select the disk or partition to erase, and then click Erase.
Specify a format, and enter a name for the disk.
Click Security Options and choose to write over the data once, 7 times, or 35 times. Click OK.
Click Erase.
Writing ...
9
On Snow Leopard, you would need to boot from an external OS to wipe the drive.
On Mountain Lion (or Lion), the system makes a recovery HD so you can self-wipe the Mac. This is a much, much faster and easier task, so I recommend you upgrade first and then do the wiping using a recovery boot and Disk Utility.
I personally would do these steps (and you could ...
8
As current hard drive-oriented techniques for file sanitization are ineffective on SSDs, I recommend to encrypt the whole hard drive using Filevault 2 (best if you did this before you put your data onto it).
(This is only possible in Lion, Filevault 1 in older versions of MacOS will only encrypt your home folder.)
This way you will not erase your data, but ...
6
While I never tried it myself, in theory you could use something like PhoneDisk to open the app's private folder and copy all the content to your computer. Then, after deleting and reinstalling the app, you should be able to copy the content back.
6
You can use the terminal to do this. The following command should work:
find /path/to/the/folder \
-name "*.jpg" \
-exec bash -c "sips -g pixelHeight -g pixelWidth {} | grep -E ' [12]?[0-9]{0,2}$' >/dev/null" \;\
-print
That command will find all JPEG files under /path/to/the/folder which have a width or a height of between 1 and 299 pixels.
...
6
First step, use a low level tool like dd to make an image of the drive as it exists now, and then stop using the drive. Every second that drive spends connected to a computer (especially a Mac) is a chance for something new to be written to it on top of data you want to recover. All of your recovery attempts should be performed on the image that you make.
...
4
You might try using Target Disk Mode - hold down T at startup and then connect the MacBook Pro to another Mac (or a PC that can read Mac drives) via FireWire or Thunderbolt.
Or try holding down the Shift key to boot into Safe Boot mode.
If neither of those work, try booting from your MacBook Pro's system restore DVD, use Disk Utility and try repairing the ...
4
SSDs don't come in an 80GB size (that I've seen -- usually multiples of 32GB). It may be possible depending on why the drive dies. If its a mechanical failure, then you could take the drive to a specialty computer repair shop (try local before the big stores), and they should be able to help you with diagnosing the actual issue. Since the data is stored ...
4
If you are comfortable using the command line, you could use dd to copy your drive byte-for-byte. First, you need to find the BSD identifier for your internal drive. If you are booted from the drive, this will be disk0. Otherwise, it is most likely disk1, but you should run the following command to see all of your disks and the partitions they contain.
...
3
Text Messages are stored in a Database format, and not as individual files. It's unlikely that they will ever be "overwritten" in the sense you ask, but may well remain in the database tables either forever, or until such regular purge mechanism clears them out on a schedule.
Depending on your OS version, you may be able to open and inspect the files. See ...
3
There is little hope unless one or both of the editors squirrel away copies of the file for you or embed the undo buffer in the document.
It really depends on the editors and the settings.
One last ditch effort is to use the mdfind command. If that file had a memorable string or misspelling you could see in an instant if any files on the disk contain that ...
3
Which iPhone OS and model do you have? The newer ones encrypt the data and the erase deletes the key. The chances of DIY recovery are slim. If you pull it off, you probably can get hired for iPhone forensics and make some serious salary doing that professionally.
Older devices are more amenable to typical recovery efforts. Either way you will need a ...
3
Sounds like your harddisk is busted. There is a feature in MacBooks which is there to help protect the disk by parking the head in the event of a fall but it's not foolproof. Even if you managed to resolve the errors, I wouldn't trust that the disk had not been damaged and you just risk further data loss in future. Best thing you can do is backup anything ...
3
Use the drive as little as possible. Plug it into an enclosure or simply boot the machine in TDM mode and connect it to another machine.
Pull over only the files you need (to minimize the time you spend accessing the drive).
You may want to do something like, just your ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, ~/Pictures, ~/Library/Mail, and ~/Library/Mail Downloads.
Do ...
3
I had an extra iPhone (that didn't have important information) which I just tried it on. Simply initiating the recovery process (by pressing and hold home button while plugging it into the computer) will not cause anything irreversible to happen on the phone. You still have to click a few buttons on iTunes to start the process.
To go out of recovery mode, ...
3
The best free solution I've found is TestDisk. I have no personal experience with it, but I've heard rave reviews.
You can also try Data Rescue 3, a paid solution. I've used an older version in the past with good results. Problem with this sort of solution is that they can only recognize certain formats of files. But there is an extensive list of files that ...
2
PhotoRec is the best tool I've found for recovering files. It does have some baffling limitations however, like the fact that it can't recover .dmg files. It's a command line program but still very easy to use. And it's free :)
This step-by-step guide on their wiki makes it even easier.
2
HFS Plus (HFS+) is a fragile and a little outdated filesystem. If you google it, you'll find many reports of filesystem corruption.
Rebooting without unmounting the filesystem is the best way to corrupt it. This happens when the mac freezes for some reason (in my case it's the nvidia video card) or power failures.
Here are some tips, that IMHO should lower ...
2
Things that could do it off the top of my head...
you said you haven't had power surges or brownouts. How are you confirming it? We had a classroom where PC power supplies were blowing seemingly at random. We had to have maintenance staff connect a monitoring meter to the circuit and discovered that outlet is having huge voltage spikes.
Memory isn't seated ...
2
Reimport the content to your library from the external hard drive. Go to File - Add folder to library and select the folder where your iTunes content is. I would recommend having it copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to Library from Edit->Preferences->Advanced. Your playlists and podcast subscriptions probably won't be restored but at least you'll ...
2
I would try your iTunes password and any others you can think of. Passwords don't magically set themselves. You or someone else must have enabled the Encrypt iTunes Backups feature, which requires setting a password.
You might be in luck, because deleting text messages (at least in iOS 4.x) doesn't actually erase the data, it still exists in your sms.db ...
2
You can boot your system from a system installed on an external drive. If your internal drive isn't damaged it will mount and you can copy files off of it.
If you have a Lion recovery partition you can use Disk Utility to "image" the main partition of your drive onto an external device before you format and reinstall. You will have to restore this image ...
2
rsync (from Terminal) has an option for that (--ignore-errors). However crafting the right command line arguments may be somewhat complicated. A nice rsync GUI is Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware)
After you are satisfied with the cloning setting, launch clone in CCC and immediately after run from terminal
ps axuww| grep rsync
and you will see the right ...
2
Try giving this a shot. Find your iPhoto library in your Pictures folder (unless you've moved it).
Right click on it, and hit Show Package Contents. In the resulting folder, look for two files named face_blob.db and face.db. These are the two files that probably got corrupted in your case.
Now, I'd browse your Time Machine backups and look for the last ...
2
Have you tried opening Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and using the commands:
killall SelfControl
or
sudo killall SelfControl
As it is not working try the hosts file:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
And look for something like this
# BEGIN SELFCONTROL BLOCK
127.0.0.1 www.nasa.gov
127.0.0.1 nasa.gov
# END SELFCONTROL BLOCK
delete the ...
2
Data Rescue is a long time favorite for undeleting files. It is not free, but you can download a free trial to see if the folder and files can be recreated before deciding to pay for the software or seeking professional recovery.
Similar to Windows, OS X doesn't wipe the files but instead marks the directory entries as free. As long as the files do not get ...
2
According to this article, you can force a Launchpad reload by removing a .db file in ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock. This file is the SQLite database for Launchpad. Theoretically, you should be able to recover the file, which has a name something like: 5187B29E-A5A8-4CD6-A688-28D426B923F6.db and move it to the correct place. Note that you should backup ...
2
If your HD still has some life you could try a few tricks:
Some people have had success with hard drives that still spin but won't mount by cooling them down with aerosol coolant or refrigeration (in a completely dry rice or silica gel filled container) and then plugging back in and if they mount, quickly creating a virtual image of the drive.
Another ...
2
Unfortunately, you are very limited in what you can do with that backup. In fact, there is literally nothing you can do with an iCloud backup unless you restore the backup. This can be done, however, on any iOS device (as in iPhone, iPod, or iPad), that is at least the iOS version that the stolen device was on. For example, if the iPhone 4 was running iOS 6, ...
2
You can press the option + R key to boot into recovery mode. Then using Disk utility and follow this guide to decrypt the partition:
http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/using-the-command-line-to-unlock-or-decrypt-your-filevault-2-encrypted-boot-drive/
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