[X4U] Recovering items in trash

[Stroller]

On 8 Nov 2007, at 04:49, Don Grant wrote:

> I threw something into the trash and emptied it. Is there any way  
> to recover
> this stuff?

Not easily.

If you wish to do so, turn your computer off IMMEDIATELY.

A utility like PhotoRec might well do the job - despite the name it  
handles many common file formats, such as Word files (and, I'm sure,  
PDFs) - or there are similar for-pay programs.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Some of the for-pay programs give you a demo & allow you to see which  
files will be recovered before you pay for them - posters here have  
reported success with them in the past.

I think that PhotoRec only recovers files in the "0001,doc",  
"0002.doc", "0001.jpg" &c format, so that you have to examine each  
file for yourself until you find the one that you want.

Presumably the for-pay-demos programs list file names, otherwise they  
wouldn't be much use.

In either case you need to boot your computer from some other drive  
and not actually use any of the files on the drive you are  
recovering. I wouldn't even copy off files that are known to be good,  
and I would ensure that Spotlight &c are disabled on the computer  
before connecting it.

The most sure way to get your files back is to send it to a data- 
recovery specialist. Prices can be reasonable - I know one chap whose  
prices start at £200 for home users with a one-week turnaround.

You strategy has to depend upon how urgent the data is, how important  
it is & budget. If you are able to mount the drive in another machine  
along with a blank drive of equal or larger size then you can do a  
bitwise copy of the drive (I use Linux & the dd utility - eg `dd if=/ 
dev/sda of=/dev/sdb`) - you can then attempt file recovery from that.

Stroller.