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Data recovery for mac?
- Thread starter btcomm
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Data Rescue II is quite competent. Macs will quickly overwrite deleted files on the hard drive, so if you're unable to get your hands on an app like this anytime soon, then shut your machine down. FWIW, this app comes with a demo that can tell you if the files are recoverable. 
Well in a way good... saves lots of memory, most OS's do this anyway. I think the assumption that Mac takes is that no one accidentally erases and empties the trash bin... wrong! But I have lost data on Windows XP, Vista, and OS X... and its never fun and usually impossible to get it back. The best advice I ever got was "always back up, there are two kinds of hard drives our there, thoe that have, and those that will fail." Moral of the story, you may not be able to recover whatever you lost but you can save yourself a headache later. I know its annoying to here "you should have..." I hate when people tell me that.
In that case you should be planning on getting Leopard, an external drive and using Time Machine.
So to clarify, do other systems intentionally not overwrite areas of the disk that have recently been made available through file deletions? And does OS X intentionally overwrite these "fresh" areas more quickly?
As mentioned, the Data Rescue demo version not only tells you if files are recoverable, but will actually let you recover 1 file with the demo version, just so you know it works.
Is time machine kinda like system restore?
two totally different things; time machine is data recovery and system restore takes you back to an earlier registry structure.
So with Data rescue II, if you had deleted files and emptied your trash can it would help in recoving them? It's not just for a drive that went bad or got corrupted? Also if someone did a secure erase from their trash can there probrably isn't much hope that the files could be recovered is it?
That's right.
Well, securely erasing the trash writes zeros over the area that was containing this information. The purpose of this is to directly make it more difficult to get the data back, albeit still not impossible. With Data Rescue II, it's unlikely you could get your data back after having it securely deleted.