I AM IN DESPERATE NEED OF HELP

[enthused91]

Hi, I'm Courtney and I own a eMac G3 10.2.8. Yesterday, I was doing normal computer stuff when I noticed that my preferences had began disappearing. For instance, my email asked me for my password and then didn't recognize it. So I tried restarting, and when the desktop was up it wasn't my personal desktop. It appeared as if everything in my computer had reset to default. When I called apple care, they basically said that they had never seen this before and couldn't help except that I could purchase a 70 dollar data recovery program. Being a poor college student, I had to decline however I am totally going mental about the whole thing. So today I have been trying desperately to reconstruct what I lost, but it is stressful. It really is strange though because there are some things that are still personalized. One weird thing I noticed was that my dock had been replaced to sit on the bottom (whereas I had put it to the side) but the programs in it were ones that I know weren't default. The default programs were re-added, but my personal additions still remained.
I believe that I used iSync after all of this occured, so nothing that I would have had saved, like Safari bookmarks or address book contents, are recoverable. If anyone can give me any help at all about this, I would be sooo appreciative because I am just so discouraged right now I could throw my mac through a window!!! I am such a fan of mac computers and having this happen really seems like a slap in the face. Any insight into this mess or suggestions about how to get my bookmarks or other lost data would help a lot, thanks!!

~*~Courtney~*~

 

[Thirteenva]

How much free hard disk space do you have? Is your drive almost full...

I had a similar problem on an almost full hard drive. My problem was i had photoshop allocated for more scratch disk space than i had hard disk space available. Some how it managed to wipe many of my preferences. I'm pretty sure it corrupted the prefs of only the apps i had open but it was still annoying.

You may want to try booting off the cd and running disk utility. Do a disk repair and a permissions repair.

 

[enthused91]

disk space

I don't know how to tell how much disk space I have, but I really wasn't saving anything so it seems to me like that wouldn't have been the problem, but I could very easily be wrong.
Apple Care had me reboot from a disk and do the disk repair etc. but nothing was red, which is supposed to mean bad, so it really didn't do anything.
I am at a total loss, I just wish I knew if there was even a possibility of finding my lost stuff, because if there isn't, I will just give up.
I also wish I knew if I could recover my safari bookmarks from iSync now that I have re-synced after they were deleted.
If you tell me how to find out the amount of disk space I have, I'll let you know how much I have.

~*~Courtney~*~

 

[jsw]

This is probably a stupid question, but do you iSync to only one device, or are there others that might have an older version?

Also, have you checked your Trash in the off chance that anything Prefs-based ended up there (it's unlikely)?

Disk space can be found by right-clicking (or control-clicking) the hard drive icon and selecting "Get Info". Still, that'll just let you know if you're almost out of room, not let you find anything you've lost.

 

[MacDawg]

What exactly have you lost Courtney? Is it just the preferences and bookmarks, or have you lost data/files as well?

 

[jsw]

I realize that you don't want to hear this, but it is very likely that what you have lost is completely gone.

However, if you're looking to get back your bookmarks, one slow way to do this at least partially is by looking at your browser history - assuming that also wasn't trashed.

Hopefully, you haven't lost too much. I had a hard disk fail in a work laptop not that long ago, and I realized that you've never backed up what you need to when something actually fails - a lot of that stuff is just plain gone.

In the future, you might want to consider making backups of your home folder (in particular, your Library folder) to CD occasionally. And, I know, I'm sure that's completely obvious to you now. Apple should provide Backup to non-.Mac members, since it's such a valuable tool.

 

[crees!]

If you tell me how to find out the amount of disk space I have, I'll let you know how much I have.

Click on Finder and look at the very bottom. It should say how much is available. That's the easiest way. You can also go into Apps > Utilities > Disk Utility, select your drive then it'll have all the info at the bottom.

 

[jsw]

Actually, before doing much more, you might want to consider backing up what you have now.

It's not entirely impossible that whatever ate your prefs is still hungry.

 

[MacDawg]

Actually, before doing much more, you might want to consider backing up what you have now.

It's not entirely impossible that whatever ate your prefs is still hungry.

That's good advice... my Mac started doing strange stuff not too long back and everything I did to correct it made things worse. I felt like I was on Apollo 13 trying to get my data backed up before everything died. I ended up having to do an erase/install of the system to correct things. Scary moments...

I don't want to minimize how you are feeling, and I know it is extremely frustrating (been there, done that), but if all you have lost is preferences and bookmarks... consider yourself lucky, back up now and reinstall your system.

 

[jsw]

Courtney, are you still around? It's been a while. I hope your system didn't fail completely!

 

[enthused91]

reply

ok, my hard drive says there is 45.75 available and 11.52 used...
I didn't just loose bookmarks, I lost address book and all my music, and everything I had on the desktop, including folders which contained some downloaded programs and other stuff. And also, every preference I had is erased, so every program I run starts from scratch. I did back up about 3 months ago, so that was of some help. I also have a preference file in my backup, but I don't really know what to do with it.
I am a .mac member, but my idisk doesn't hold that much so I can't really do much backing up to it, I use cd-rw's usually so I can re-write to them. I think I am going to start doing a back up weekly though.
Should I back up and and then reinstall my system?
When I was talking to apple care, they actually said that it was possible that my preferences were moved to the trash, although it is a rare occurance, however I tried emptying the trash before I realized that that was a possibility.
Also, does anyone know about the iSync question about whether I can revert to the last sync I did that contained my bookmarks instead of the very last one where everything was already erased?

Thank you so much for all the responses thus far, they are much appreciated.

~*~Courtney~*~