[G4] File "Unerasing"

[Dale Hoffman]

A friend brought in his G5 (OS 10.3.9) hoping to use Norton's 
"Unerase" utility to recover some mistakenly deleted files. I used to 
use NUM with File Saver installed and had successfully recovered 
deleted files so I had some hope for helping him get at least some of 
his data back.  After booting from the Norton Utilities 8.0 CD, we 
ran Unerase which only returned a dozen or so very old and useless 
files. He had not been using Filesaver as recommended, but I expected 
better results than that.

We then did an experiment where we trashed a small file and 
immediately tried to recover it using Unerase. No intervening disk 
activity to mung the directory. The utility did not find it, showing 
only the handful of files it had located earlier. A second attempt at 
file retrieval using Techtools proved ineffective also.

Are file retrieval utilities that dependent on assisting components 
like File Saver, or is there something else going on with my friend's 
system?

DaleH